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PROBLEMS OF THE SPIRITUAL

PROBLEMS OF
IHE SPIRITUAL

BV THE

KKVHKHNI) AklilUR CtiAMBKKS

Ai»ociaif ni Kir.s» C oil«f e. L-oadoii
Vr nr o( Hi.H.kf.rKarii. Hampikire;
(AiitW oi * O.., L.(e »Uet Dwih," " M»n an/l iKe Sp.',.u»l WorU.''
Th..*<>gh«! jS xi.t Spritu*!. ■ itiH "ProbU,,^ of the ISwiriiu*! ' )

sTot cr.to ;
^It (LEI. i.ANi> & STF.VVART,
rUBUbtiLkS.

/ f/y-r^i^'^ 3* / *« -.

4^/fAjtitt^

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PROBLEMS OF
THE SPIRITUAL

BY THE

REVEREND ARTHUR CHAMBERS

Aitociate of King's College, Londm

Vicar of Brockenhurit. Hampthire;

(Author of "Our Life after Death." " Man and the Spiritual World.'*

•Thoughts of the Spiritual," and "Problems of the Spiritual.")

Pronto :

McClelland & stewart,

PUBLISHERS.

TO MARK MY APPRECIATION

of our long-continued friendship, and, moreover, to thank

him for the encouragement he has afforded

me in the performance of a not

altogether easy task,

I DEDICATE THIS VOLUME

TO THR

ESTEEMED FRIEND

who suggested the simple and apt title thereof.

^^^

PREFACE.

It may help the Reader to better understand the
purport of this volume, if f briefly state the con-
siderations which have led me to write it.

There was a necessity for my doing so ; I had no
other means of discharging an obligation imposed
upon me.

Let me explain.

Some into whose hands this comes, are aware that
I have previously published three volumes on the
subject of the Spiritual World, which have had a
very large circulation in this and other countries.
The result has been a correspondence so over-
whelmingly great, as to make it impossible for me
to keep abreast of it. Thousands of letters have
been sent to me by earnest ones from all quarters of
the world.

Amid the pressing duties of a ministerial life, I

vin

PREFACE.

f':

»i

have strenuously set myself to reply to those letters ;
and a great number of them have been answered.
But many have not.

Among the latter, are those which contain ques-
tions, not only important to the writers in view of
their search for truth and for the removal of diffi-
culties which are presented to their mind, but which,
moreover, are incapable of being adequately answered
within the circumscribed limits of ordinary corre-
spondence. Some of the letters submit a senes of
questions, the answering of which would involve the
writing of matter sufficient to form a booklet.

Moreover, in many cases, questions which have
been fully answered by me on several occasions, have
again and again been submitted by other enquirers.
It will thus be seen how a great pile of the " Un-
answered" has persistently grown, without there
being any possibility, in spite of all my efforts, of
diminishing it. How could I answer those Ques-
tioners ? What could I do to rid myself of the
unpleasant thought that some— not loiowing the
circumstances of the case— might be accounting me
neglectful or discourteous ? This book is an attempt
to solve, or to partially solve, the difficulty.

From the numerous questions sent to me, I have

PREFACE.

carefully selected such as I deem to be the most im<
portant and which have been the most often
propo jd ; and then I have tried to answer them fully
and exhaustively in the pages of this volume.

It may be that those whose kind communications
have elicited — until now — no response, will, after this
explanation, extend to me their forgiveness.

The other consideration which has impelled me
to write this book is the desire to vindicate the
position of those who embody in the Christian
Religion the ascertained facts of Psychic life, and
the " Larger Hope."

The ranges of present-day knowledge and
thought are larger and wider than those of the past.
Science, during the last half-ceutury, after having
im folded to us marvel after marvel with regard to
the Physical, has of late directed her researches to
the domain of the Spiritual. There, wonder after
wonder has been disclosed. Psychic Phenomena
have been carefully investigated, and their reality
avouched by many of he foremost men of the day ;
until a new continent of life and fssibility has
been laid open before us, and a revealing light has
been flung on the mystery of Human Being.

Further, the mind of this present age has moved

* PREFACE.

on to the acquirement of fuller and worthier con-
ceptions of God, His character, and His purposes with
respect to mankind. Men are no longer able to think
of Him as He was presented by the Schoolmen and
divmes of bygone ages. The crude and anthropo-
morphic notions of Him are fast disappearing.
Many of the old religious doctrines-^speciaUy those
which deal with Eschatology-have ceased to com-
mend themselves to the intelligence and the mora
mstincts of the day. Accepted without question in
the past, as the integrant parts of Christian Truth
these doctrines have been found to voice, not the
teaching of the Master Himself, but the unevolvcd
Ideas of those who interpreted His teaching. In a
word, men's enlarged conception of their spiritual
organization, and their reahzation that a non-
Physical realm of life and energy encompasses and
mterpenetrates them, has caused them to re-cast
their thot:ghts concerning God and Truth.

Now, it is this fuller revealment of Spiritual
reahties, manifested in Psychic Phenomena, and this
re-casting of ideas concerning God and the scope of
His Gospel, which is causing religious disquiet to
some.

This enhanced knowledge and wider thought are

PREFACE.

regarded as being incompatible with the teaching
of Christianity. The persons to whom I refer are
mentally disturbed by any presentment of truth
which differs from that which has been accepted by
them. They have been trained to believe that the
theological pronouncements and definitions of the
Church or Body to which they have attached them-
selves, are the final utterances of God in respect to
Divine Truth. They suppose that to question those
pronouncements, and to imagine them capable of
being altered or modified, is a sure indication of
declension from the Christian Faith. They are
aware that the present-day conceptions, in regard
to God and His purposes, and in regard to man and
his interior constitution and relationship to the
Spiritual Universe, are not in agreement with the
conceptions of the generally accepted exponents of
Christ's Religion who have lived since Bible-times.

All this constitutes a very real difficulty to such
Christians. Is this fuller knowledge concerning the
Spiritual, and is this brighter and more hopeful out-
look towards God and the Future, inimical to the
Gospel which Jesus taught ?

We believe it is not ; and a further object in view
in the writing of this book, is to try and show that

xii

PREFACE.

the Gospel of Christ is so Divine and comprehensive
a thing as to be capable of embodying all the
acquisitions of knowledge and all the movements of
men's minds to higher thought and aspiration.

The Christian Religion, we believe, would cease to
maintain its hold on lankind, were it not able, as
God's great ocean of Revelation, to draw into Itself
and absorb all the streams of Truth which flow
through the channels of the Religions of the world,
as well as those tributaries and brooklets of enlighten'
ment which from the uplands of human thought
slowly, but surely, find their way into the streams.

Arthur Chambers.

Brockenhurst, Hampshire,
August, 1907.

CONTENTS.

PART I.

I. Can the Departed be objectively present ? If

so, in what way rin they manifest them-
selves to us as to be recognizable ? .

II. Is the fact that trickery and imposture
have been associated with Spiritualism,
a proof that it is the outcome of false-
hood and credulity ? . . .

III. Does the prohibition against intercourse
with " famiUar spirits," as given to the
ancient Israelites, imply that all com-
munion with the Spirit-world is forbidden
by God ?...♦••

IV. How can it be explained that many of
the communications alleged to come from
discamate beings are unsatisfactory, mis-
leading and untruthful ? . . •

PACK

XIV

CONTENTS.

V. Is there a danger in attending st'anccs,
on the ground that at such meetings evil
and deceiving spirits may be attracted ?

VI. Will our earthly relationships be main-
tained in the Other World ?

VII. Why do not all the Departed manifest
themselves to those whom they have left
behind ? . . ^

VIII. Will the fpct that beings in Spirit-lifo'
are on different planes of life and experience
be an obstacle to re-union ?

IX. Apart from direct communications from
them, how may we best realize that the
Departed are still living and in relationship

with us ?

* • • . .

X. Are not such ex])ressions as— " The sea
gavt up the dead which were in it," " Them
which sleep," and " Those that are in the
graves"— an indication that the New
Testament writers regarded Death as a
temporary cessation of conscious being ? .

I'ACIR
81

97
III

124

132

^^»r *1»-*r^*.»^p».

CONTENTS.

PART II.

I. Objections against " The Larger Hope "
considered.

" The book—' Our Life after Death '
teaches Universalism. It leaves out the
strong things Jesus Christ said. What
is called ' the strong language of the
Athanasian Creed ' is our Lord's own
teaching."

C^m report in "Church Times" of March
gth, 1906, of the Bishop of London's
statement. Sec note at end of chapter.)

" The Times of the Restitution of all

FAGR

II.

IIL

IV.

VI.

things." ......

" As in Adam all die, even so in Christ
shall all be made alive." ....

" The Saviour of all men."
" Our God is a consuming Fire."

What Greek word denoting " never-
ending " could the writers of the New
Testament have used, if the word a.Wirc
(translated " everlasting " and " eternal ")
will not sustain that signification ? .

141

163

1O6
170

174

180

XVI

CONTENTS.

VII. Is there a danger, in regard to the Uni-
versalist belief, of making the Benevolence
of God dominate His Holiness and Justice
in such a way as to constitute Him the
Tolerator of evil ?

VIII. Is it right to pray for those who have
departed this life as non-Christians ? If so,
what should be the character of our prayers
for them ?

IX. If Christians depart this hfe to he with
Christ, how can our prayers benefit them ?
Does He not know exactly what to do for
them without our intercessions on their
behalf?

X. On what grounds can we base our belief
that Jesus is not only pre-eminently a Son
of God, but the Son of God, in the sense of
being Divine?

PAGE

i88

204

219

226

■3

PROBLEMS OF THE SPIRITUAL.

PART I.

/. Our Mother, just before she died, very calmly and
emphatically declared that she saw and recognized
several persons who had departed this life years before.
Do you think this was merely a subjective experience,
or were those departed ones actually and objectively
present? And if the latter, how was she able to recog-
nize them, seeing that the physical form, in which
alone she had known them, had been laid aside ?

In answer to the first of these questions, we say —
Yes ; we beUeve that persons can, after death, be
objectively present, and possess the power, exercised
under certain conditions, of manifesting them-
selves to those living in the earth-life. We submit
the reasons on which we ground this belief.

I. There is a very strong presumption that this
is so, arising from the fact that there has existed

a PROBLEMS OF THE SPIRITUAL.

throughout all past ages, and there exists now, an
ineradicable conviction that, at times, the so-called
" dead " return.

Among all the races of mankind, civilized and
uncivilized, and under all the differing phases of
religious, or non-religious, thought, men have per-
sistently believed in, and borne testimony to, the
possibility of the departed manifesting themselves ;
and that, in spite of all the efforts which have been
made t4 prove the belief a foolish and groundless
one. The science of the past (not the science of
to-day) has ridiculed the idea as being the outcome
of superstition and ignorance. The Church herself,
with a curious lack of consistency, has labelled it
as an unscriptural and a rather wiclied notion.
And yet, throughout the whole history of the race,
men have pertinaciously clung to it, and no testi-
mony borne to anything outside the ordinary ex-
periences of mankind has ever been so great and
so continuous as that which has been given in
regard to appearances after death.

This persistent conviction is significant. It points
to fact as the basis upon which it rests. Why, we
ask, if the departed have never returned, have men
so persistently believed the opposite ?

PROBLEMS OF THE SPIRITUAL.

The objector will answer, that this conviction,
although so widespread, can only be classed among
many other baseless ideas pertaining to ages of un-
enlightenment ; and that as mankind advances in
knowledge, this particular notion will cease to
command belief.

This supposition is completely contradicted by
present-day fact. The extraordinary advance that
has been made in science and general knowledge,
during the past twenty « thirty years has neither
removed nor ^aken this conviction in the minds
of men ; on nie other hand, it has become enor-
mously strengthened and intensified. The belief
in the return of the departed, so far from dying out
in the light of fuller knowledge, is more persistent
and widespread to-day than ever it has been ; and
in the ranks of the bcliev^i-s are to be found some
of the foremost men of Science. In a word, the
advance of knowledge has increased the belief.
This is inexplicable on the supposition that the belief
is founded on a fancy ; it is to be accounted for, if
it is built on a foundation of fact.

Thus, the persistent conviction on the part of
mankind that appearances after death do take
place, is to us a very strong presumption (apart

)

4 PROBLEMS OF THE SPIRITUAL.

from all direct evidence) that such is the case. Had
the alleged fact been impossible of verification, the
belief in it would have died out, as have baseless
notions, long ago.

II. The verification, after careful investigation
by scientific men, of the present-day facts of Psy-
chical Phenomena, affords another strong reason
for believing that the departed may return to us.
The idea of such return is no longer scouted by men
who have given their attention to the matter as
foolish and impossible. The deniers of the fact are
for the greater part those who assume the un-
scientific attitude of antecedently settling them-
selves in the conviction that the thing is im-
possible, and then of declining to make any enquiry,
or to accept any evidence whatsoever on the
subject.

The pronouncements of such persons count for
simply nothing at all. The opinion of the person
whc says— "The thing, I am convinced, is im-
possible; and therefore I will consider no evidence
in support of it,"— is so completely outside the
radius of practical importance, that we may dismiss
it as valueless, as we should the opinion of one
who, having antecedently come to the conclusion

|!j

PROBLEMS OF THE SPIRITUAL. 5

that the North Pole could not possibly exist, ignored
every scientifically ascertained fact concerning the
same.

But we turn to the men who have given thought
and attention to the subject ; to men whose opinions
are of weight, because, by culture and profession,
they are qualified to weigh evidence and estimate
fact. I am referring to some of the most distin-
guished and well-known of the scientific men of the
present time. They have investigated the existing
facts of Psjciiic Phenomena, and have given to the
world statements concerning them, which have
revolutionized the ordinary ideas of men.

We ask the thoughtful enquirer to " read, mark,
learn, and inwardly digest " all that is contained in
those two exhaustive volumes, which embody the
results of the scientific examination of Psychical
Phenomena, by the late Professor Myers, (" Human
Personality ; and its Survival of Bodily Death.")
It will open the eyes of some to the possibilities of
the Spiritual. It will go very far towards making the
thought of manifestation after death a believable one.

An absolute change has come over the mind of
Science, in regard to the Spiritual and its possi-
bilities. She, as represented by the ablest •;f her

6 PROBLEMS OF THE SPIRITUAL.

exponents, is no longer materialistic. She has at
length reached the point of acknowledging that it is
impossible to account for certain experiences vouch-
safed to many men and women on any hypothesis
of the merely Physical. She has even gone the
length of admitting, that apart from the acknow-
ledgment of that which within us and about us
transcends the Physical and which links us with
the Spiritual, many of the inherent powers and tlie
experiences of thousands of our race are inex-
plicable.

It may be asked— In regard to Science, what has
brought about this change of front? Why has
Science, so materialistic in the past, become now
so pre-eminently the means by which men are so
much better realizing the possibilities of Spirit ?

We answer,-the fact of Psychic Phenomena
of late years, has become so persistent and demon-
strable, that Science has been unable any longer to
ignore it.

In the past, the followers of Science, no less than
the adherents to Rehgion, have been handicapped
against the acquirement of fuller knowledge, by
prejudice and traditionalism. It is very different
now. Both Systems are learning that all the facts

PROBLEMS OF THE SPIRITUAL. 7

of human experience must be honestly faced, if
truth is to be attained. Many of the old concep-
tions in regard to Religion are vanishing away, and
better and truer ideas are taking their place. And
the Science of to-day has made admissions with
respect to human life and experience, which would
have been ridiculed by the scientific men of fifty
years ago. The existence of the soul ; its survival
of bodily death, and the possibility of communica-
tion between those in Spirit-life and those in Earth-
life, are no longer ideas which Science proclaims
to be groundless and incredible.

There are many of our distinguished men of
Science, unlabelled as to religious creed, who, in
consequence of a knowledge acquired through the
investigation of Psychical Phenomena, have an in-
tenser belief in the reality of the Spiritual, than
many Christians who persuade themselves that they
believe all the Spiritual wonders recorded in the
Bible.

Thus, in the face of the aumissions of Science in
regard to the Spiritual ; in face of the enormous
testimony borne by mankind to the effect that the
departed may, and do return, which testimony has
not been overthrown by scientific investigation, we

PROBLEMS OF THE SPIRITUAL.

'»

are driven to the conclusion that the reappearance
of those who have passed hence is a verifiable
fact.

III. An enormous amount of direct testimony
has been borne by " all sorts and conditions " of
men, as to the fact of appearances, after death.

Let any enquirer on this point but take the
trouble to ask those with whom he may come into
contact, if any such experience has come within the
range of their knowledge, and we venture to say that
every other person so questioned will recount some
instance of a departed one having been seen, either
by himself, or by someone whose testimony he
accepts. It is only as we make enquiries, that we
find out how widespread is the experience with vhich
we are dealing. Thousands never mention to
others-save, perhaps, to their own circle-what
they know in regard to this subject. They are
afraid of being accounted weak-minded, or un-
truthful, and so the testimony adduced-great as
it is, is less than it would be, if it were not for this
fear of the scoffer. Moreover, it is a notable fact,
that the ones who give their testimony as io any
personal experience of manifestation after death
are convinced that their experience was objectively

PROBLEMS OF THE SPIRITUAL. 9

real, and not to be attributed to hallucination.
The foUowing is an instance. An old gentleman
(connected with the writer) lost his wife, to whom
he was deeply attached. He felt the bereavement
acutely. One morning, at the breakfast-table, he
told his sons he had had a strange experience ; all
the more strange to him, because, until then, he had
deemed such a thing impossible. He, when lying
awake, and thinking of other matters, had seen his
departed wife standing beside his bed. She had
smiled on him, and said : " John, you will be with me
in May." The sons pronounced the experience to
be only a dream, or the outcome of overwrought
imagination. The father most calmly asserted that
it was not so, but an objective reality. His sons
remained unconvinced, and the old man never
again alluded to the subject. Five or six months
passed, and the father regained all his old cheer-
fulness and interest in life. An evening-party was
given by him to celebrate his birthday, and those
present remarked how well he appeared to have
recovered the shock of his wife's death. On the
following morning, he was found dead in his bed ;
and it was the month of May. There are thousands'
of recorded experiences simUar to this, and we

PROBLEMS OF THE SPIRITUAL.

contend that it is more reasonable to regard them
as based on fact, than on fancy; of being objective,
rather than subjective. A person completely sane,
calm, and invariably truthful, deliberately affirms
that he has seen a dear one after death, and that
the experience was not imagination. Those who
have not had the experience, or any like experience,
as positively assert the opposite.

But which statement, we ask, is of the more
evidential value — that of the one who had the ex-
perience, or that of those who did not have it ? We
do not usually attach much importance to the
pronouncement of any one concerning a subject,
about which he acknowledges a total lack of ex-
perience, and a fixed conviction that no idea but his
own can possibly be right. We drop him outside
the reckoning, as not possessing the necessary data
upon which to come to a true conclusion.

Thus, the testimony of one person who has had
any experience of post-mortem appearances, is worth
more in assisting us to come at the truth of the
matter, than all the assertions of a hundred others,
who have had no such experiences. We admit this
principle in the concerns of every-day life.

Again, if it is difficult to cast aside as unreliable

I'J

PROBLEMS OF THE SPIRITUAL.

•■X

. -rr.

the testimony regarding an appearance after death,
of a person whom, in all other respects, we regard as
sober-minded and truth-loving, it is still more
difficult to reject the testimony of several persons
who conjointly and simultaneously have the same
experience. There are a great number of verified
instances of two, three, or more persons who have
seen the departed at the same time, and in piocisely
the same way, as to leave no room for the supposi-
tion that the experience can be explained as hallu'
cination. The writer himself has had such an
experience. He saw, in company with an intimate
friend, a manifestation which presented itself, in
every detail, in precisely the same way to him as it
did to his friend. If this experier^e is to be ac-
counted for on the hypothesis of its being merely
subjective, then we are shut up to the conclusion that
two absolutely independent minds were suddenly
and simultaneously so affected, as to similarly see,
in every particular, something which had no exist-
ence except in imagination. We ask, in the face of
this concurrent experience, which is the more lea-
sonable explanation— that the experience is to be
attributed to a disordered mind, or to objective
fact?

PROBLEMS OF THE SPIRITUAL.

Thus, wc have, in the direct testimony adduced
by thousands of our fellow>beings, another strong
reason for accepting as true, that the departed may,
and do, at times manifest themf ::lves to us.

IV. We have the statements of the Bible that
persons, after death, hj» ve objectively manifested them-
selves. The testimony of the Bible on this point
is very emphatic, and it ought to settle the question
at once for those who profess to believe that Book.
And yet, strange to say, the ones least disposed to
admit the possibility of post-mortem appearances are
very often those whose Religion, as Christians, is
founded on the fact of appearances after death.

The Christian Religion rests on the acknow-
ledged truth that our Lord Jesus Christ was seen,
after death, by a considerable number of persons.
He was seen under circumstances which preclude the
possibility of accounting for His appearances on the
hypothesis of merely mental impressions. He was,
moreover, seen in such a way as to demonstrate the
fact that He had passed beyond the restrictions of
the Physical, and was living in the environment of
the Spiritual. He could suddenly present Himself
before the eyes of astonished Apostles, in a room
whose door was closed and barred. He could in-

PROBLEMS OF THE SPIRITUAL. 23

stantly vanish from their sight ; could quickly trans-

port Himself from place to place ; could char je His

form ; be unrecognized for a while by those who

knew Him well, and could cause Himself to soar

upward in seeming contravention of the law of

gravitation. In a word, from a World trans-

cending the Physical, into which He had entered at

death. He presented Himself to men and women still

on the earth-plane ; and they acknowledged the fact,

and the Christian Religion was built on it. No

Christian, after this, can consistently and logically

doubt the possibility of manifestations fiom the

World of Spirit.

If the Bible be true in stating that Samuel and
Moses and Jesus, and " many of the saints which
appeared unto many " at the time of the Crucinxion,
and the " fellow-servant of the brethren, the
prophets," who came to St. John at Patmos— pre-
sented themselves after death, then we contend that
the Christian Religion itself demands us to believe
that the so-called "dead" may, and do, return.
If we deny that such manifestations are possible,
we have cut away from ourselves all reasons for
believing the Scripture records. The Spiritual
World to-day is no different from what it always

PROBLEMS OF T^^

''IRITUAL.

has been. What was x ib!^ ,nd actual in the
past is so to-day. And the accumulated evidence
of this age in regard to Spiritual realities confirms
this statement.

We proceed to answer the other question sub-
mitted above : — How was the mother, who on her
death-bed declared she saw and recognized departed
ones — able to recognize them ; seeing that the
physical body, in which only she had previously
known them, had been laid aside ? There are two
ways by which a being passed into spirit-life can
manifest himself and make himself recognizable to
those in earth-life. — {a) By the clothing of his
spirit-presence with a thought-form, in such a manner
that he assumes the appearance in which he had
been previously known by those to whom he mani-
fests, (b) By building up around his spirit-presence
a temporary encasement, constructed from particles
and emanations drawn from physical bodies. This
latter is commonly called " MateriaUzation."

With regard to the first of these two methods of
manifestation. The appearance produced as a
thought-form is not physical, nor can it be phy-
sically perceived. It is a creation of Thought.

4>'

PROBLEMS OF THE SPIRITUAL. 1 5

The ex-carnate being, knowing that he would be
unrecognized, except in the appearance in which he
had been known in earth-life, thirk^ of In'mself in
that way, and his thought takes foi in, and his s- irit-
presence is invested with that forra Thus a jeing
in spirit-life is able to manifest himself in different
ways to different persons, in accordance with the
manner in which he may think of himself. If he
were to appear to one who had only known him in
earth-life as a young man, he would think of him-
self as such, and be presented in that form. If he
were to manifest to another who had known him in
later life, he would mentally draw the picture of
himself in that condition, and be seen in correspond-
ence with that thought. When the prophet Samuel
was seen after death, it was in the form of an " old
man " (i Sam. xxviii. 14 v.)— the form in which alone
he would have been recognized. As to this power
of the Mind to produce form, and how it does so, we
know but little as yet ; but there are many indica-
tions that the fact is coming within the bounds of
scientific demonstration. It is known that, per-
vading all space and interpenetrating all physical
matter, is a subtile element— the .Ether. It may
be that thought-forms are the result of mental

PROBLEMS OF THE SPIRITUAL.

energy, projected as vibratory motions, upon the
aetheric atmosphere, and that these register thereon
the impressions and images created in the Mind.
There seems to be no greater diificulty in supposing
the aether capable of registering a Mind-image, than
in knowing that the sensitized plate of the photo-
grapher can register the likeness of a physical object.
A spirit-being appears to possess the power, not
only of projecting these Mind-images which he
creates upon the aetheric atmosphere in which he has
his being, but of so identifying himself with the pro-
jected image, as to merge, for a while at least, his
spiritual self into it. He is seen, then, in a thought-
form of his own creating. Thus, in the Spirit-
World, our environment and our self as we appear
to others, is mainly determined by our Mind.

If this be so, it mav be asked — How can non-
physical thought- forms be seen by one whose vision
of objective realities is dependent upon the physical
eyes ? In other words, — How can a spirit-being
who has enwrapped himself in a thought-form be
seen by those still living in the earthly body ? The
answer is — by mean" of the faculties of the interior
spirit-body. Within our outer physical body lies
this spirit-body — the encasement of our spirit-self.

PROBLEMS OF THE SPIRITUAL.

St. Paul, writing on this subj ct in i Cor. xv. 44 v.

states fort (Tiii/ia }l/vxtKbv, Kai tan auifta Tn'tvfiariKov " —

there is a natural body (i.e. a body pertaining to
this liie only), and there is (i.e. now) a spiritual
"Ody. Spirit and spirit-body constitute what we
call " soul." A man after death is an cx-carnate
being — a spirit; but he is not a shapeless entity,
a fluidic essence : he has a bodily form ; he is in
a spirit-body. This spirit-body possesses faculties,
which correspond with the faculties of the physical
body, but transcend them. The powers of sight and
hearing in the spirit-body are intensified. The eyes
and ears of the physical body can be sensitive to
only a limited number of vibrations in regard to
sight and sound.

The faculties of the spirit-' on the other

hand, are capable of receiving ic vibrations ;

whereby sights invisible to physical eyes, and
sounds inaudible to physical ears are perceptible to
the spiritual organization. The normal condition
of the spirit-body, while encased within the phy-
sical, is undevelopment. The later-* powers are
there, but their close association for a while with the
Physical body places them under restriction. The
inherent capabilities of the soul-man are at a dis-

PROBLEMS OF THE SPIRITUAL.

advantage in exercising themselves through the
environment of the physical man. The bright
electric light can only shine but dimly through the
coarse, enveloping medium of a London fog. There
is a Ukeness between the condition of our spirit-
body and that of the physical body of a child shortly
before birth. The latter has all the potentialities
of perceiving sights and sounds. It has eyes and
ears ; but until birth they are unopened. The prae-
natal conditions of existence afford no scope for the
exercise of those powers. Birth to it means a
quickening and an opening of already existing
faculties. It becomes, then, en rapport with a world
of physical sight and sound.

To us, physical depth involve^ ' similar experi-
ence. Death removes from us the restrictions of the
Physical. By it, the body of our spirit-self is brought
into adjustment, and is made capable of functioning
in an environment where the possibilities of spiritual
seeing and hearing surpass the possibilities of the
physical. After death, the conditions of being
become altered : then we live and move in the do-
main of the aetheric, and the horizon of perception,
of observation and inherent power becomes enor-
mously extended.

PROBLEMS OF THE SPIRITUAL.

Thus the "resurrection" (the anastasis, the
advance) which Christ referred to, in His argument
with the Sadducees, means the liberation of the
spirit-body from the obstructive connection with
the Physical, and the exercise of higher powers by
the spiritual man. But this opening and quicken-
ing of the faculties of our interior spirit-body takes
place, sometimes, before death. Persons, still resident
in the earthly body, at times see and hear that which
physical eyes and ears are incapable of perceiving.
From beginning to end, the Bible is full of such in-
stances. The spiritual beings who were seen by
patriarchs, seers and others were not seen through
the mediumship of the physical eyes, but by an ab-
normal opening of the sight of the spirit-body.
" Lord, open his eyes that he may see," prayed
Elisha, in regard to the young man, whose physi-
cal eyes were insensible to the nearness and reality
of the Spiritual. (2 Kings vi. 17 v.) And the
opening of his eyes disclosed to him wonders beyond
the ken of the Physical. There can be no doubt that
the reason why our Lord selected St. Peter, St.
James and St. John to be witnesses of tha^ Spiritual
revealment on the Mount of Transfiguration, was
because they alone of all the other Apostles were so

PROBLEMS OF THE SPIRITUAL.

spiritually constituted, as to be clairvoyantly and
clairaudiently capable of seeing and hearing the
spiritual visitants who there manifested themselves.
In the case of the Mother who declared, just before
she died, that she saw and recognized departed ones,
we believe that there was a quickening, an opening,
of the faculties of her interior spirit-body, by which-
she was made capable of perceiving the presence of
those persons. Those dear ones had been drawn to
that death-chamber by the magnetic power of Love.
We dare believe that the great All-Father of Love
commissioned them to come, in order to remove
the " sting of death," and to mitigate that feeling
of strangeness which must come to a human soul,
in passing from the conditions of the Physical to
those of the Spiritual. The spirit-friends wanted
the dying woman to know they were with her. They
pictured themselves as they knew she was thinking
of them. In so doing, they enwrapped their spiritual
selves in thought-forms. Others in the death -
chamber saw them not. The eyes of their spirit -
body were unopened ; and like Balaam, under those
conditions, they were conscious of no angel beside
them. The Mother saw the God-sent visitants.
Her indwelling spirit-body, feeling the first throb of

PROBLEMS OF THE SPIRITUAL.

expanding life, received the " Ephphatha " of God,
and looking through the crumbling walls of the
Physical, she saw the Spiritual.

Apart from the creation of Thought-forms, those
who have passed hence can manifest themselves to
those on earth in another .vay. By means of
Materialization. There is an incontrovertible mass
of evidence to prove that it is possible, under certain
physical conditions, for a spirit-being to present
himself as encased in a temporarily-assumed physical
body. Materialization is a verifiable fact ; it has
been attested by some of the foremost scientists and
investigators of the present time. Of course, there
is a considerable section of mankind which is uncon-
vinced in regard to it, and it is absolutely hopeless
to try to convince such. Persons of this class know
little or nothing about the subject ; they do not want
to know, and, moreover, they are antecedently
positive that such a thing could never be. We are
not concerned about them. They are simply lagging
behind the ascertained knowledge of the day ; the
fact of Materialization will be admitted by them
before long, and then will come to them a startling
revelation as to the possibilities of spirit.

It is for the information of those who arc prepared

PROBLEMS OF THE SPIRITUAL.

to enquire and to accept investigated and verified
facts, that we are writing. Materializations have
taken place, and are constantly taking place, under
conditions and circumstances which shut out the
possibility of hallucination or imposture. The
writer, in the presence of a clergyman and others,
has seen, on the same evening, two such materializa-
tions (the one of a child and the other of a man) in
the barely-furnished parlour of an artisan's cottage.
The whole process of materialization and de-
materialization was seen. And testimony similar
to this has been adduced by scientific men.

It will be asked — How can a spirit materialize ?
By taking the aura, which is matter in a fluid con-
dition, as it exhales from the physical bodies of
persons, and consolidatin^j and constructing this
around the spirit-self in such a way as to form a
temporary physical encasement ; which encasement
is as appreciable by the eyes and the touch as any
ordinary physical bod^ This aura is similar in
appearance to the mist-like exhalation which can be
seen arising from a hard-driven horse on a frosty
day. It is physical matter in a gaseous state , md
from all persons it is constantly exhaling. Some
bodies give it off more freely than others ; and those

PROBLEMS OF THE SPIRITUAL.

with whom this is the case constitute the " i.iediums,"
the ones so essential to materialization. When a
number of persons are together in a room in which
this aura is confined, the conditions are favour-
able to materialization. A spiritual being can
collect it, can draw it to himself, can consolidate and
mould it, and build it up around himself as a body
physically substantial and tangible. And more
than this— the enhanced power of Mind and the
formative energy possessed by it, enables the spirit -
being, desirous of being recognized by those to whom
he is manifesting, to impress upon the structure
which he has temporarily built for himself, the form
and characteristics of that picture of himself which
he has antecedently created in his mina.

The adaptation of physical matter by a spirit
for the purpose of manifestation to those whose
vision does not extend beyond the physical, would
seem, from what has been observed, to be not granted
to all. Moreover, a spirit appea'-s to possess no
power of retaining for any length of time the
materialized body he may have formed. In the
personal experience to which I have alluded, the
little child who materialized at arm's length before
us, was heard by all of us to say : " I cannot keep the

34 PROBLEMS OF THE SPIRITUAL.

power ; it is going " ; and we saw the form that had
touched as, and had kissed the mother who wa»
present, melt and disappear. May not the ex-
planation be, that a spiritual being, although, at
times, permitted by the Father-God to come again
into relationship with the Physical, is not allowed to
remain therein ? May this not be the reason why
the spiritual visitants seen by the ones of Bible-
times suddenly vanished, and why the Christ, when
He appeared in that room at Emmaus " vanished
out of their sight " We regard, therefore. Materiali-
zation, not as a normal experience of spirit-beings,
but as a means permitted to some to lift the dark
shadow flung by Death, and to verif the words of
Jesus—" They all live unto God."

//. Is the fact that trickery and imposture have
been associated with Spiritualism, a proof that it is
the outcome of falsehood and credulity ?

No ; and such reasoning is wholly inconsequent.
Throughout the history of the world, falsehood has
been constantly associated with truth; but, while
it has damaged the cause of truth, it has constituted
no real objection against the truth itself. A thing
may be true, and, as such, commend itself to persons
of the highest intelligence, and yet may become so
mixed up with that which is false and foolish, as to
cause the indiscriminating observer to be unable to
perceive the tr because of the falsehood. It has
ever been so ; nay more, it seems as if the greater
and more important any truth is, the more does it
lend itself to the possibility of admixture with error
and falsehood. Take, e.g., the greatest of all truths
— that which is connected with the Person and
character of God. No truth has ever been so over-
laid with error, so encrusted with superstition, and

PROBLEMS OF THE SPIRITUAI

SO associated with untruth, as this truth. Yet the
truth itself concerning God is not discarded by us be-
cause of this. The honest " seeker after God " tries
to dissociate the truth from the falsehood. Take
another instance — the Christian Religion. We believe
that it has its foundation in that which is essentially
true. Its Founder called Himself, " the Truth."

And yet the vilest deeds and some of the greatest
impostures have been practised in its sacred name.
Good men and women have been persecuted, im-
prisoned and burnt at the stake by the professors
of it. All sorts of ecclesiastical frauds and decep-
tions have been resorted to, for the purpose of up-
holding the authority of the Church, and of stimu-
lating the religious credulity of the masses.

" Very shocking ! " says the man who has en-
lightened moral instincts, but is not a discriminator,
" the whole thing is falsehood and evil." He makes
a mistake. He allows the increment of error and
falsehood, which has been imposed on truth, to blind
him to the truth itself. In regard to Religion, to
Science and a thousand -and -one other things, the
truth exists in spite of all the falsehood which may
have been associated with it.

The case is precisely the same with respect to

PROBLEMS OF THE SPIRITUAL.

«7

Spiritualism. The thing itscH is true. The pheno-
mena connected with it arc verifiable facts. The
testimony of thousands of persons now living— in-
eluding that of some of the foremost scientific men
—has been adduced, that these phenomena have
been witnessed by them under conditions making
trickery, or hallucination, an impossibility. The
truth of the thing can be, and has been, proved.
Tricksters and impostors may from time to time be
detected in their dishonest practices in the name
of Spiritualism, and rightfully made to answer the
charge in the Law Courts; judges and counsel,
in their ignorance of present-day facts, and their
anxiety to provoke the laugh of an uninformed
crowd, may cast ridicule upon the thing ; but the
fact remains that there are to-day great numbers of
enlightened and cultured persons— men and women
of sound discriminating iwwer— who are believers
in Spiritualism, in spite of all their antecedent pre-
judices against it. These are not the class who would
openly avow their belief in a thing which has no
basis but in falsehood and sham.

We admit that in some cases— in many cases, if
you like — Spiritualism has become associated with
impostors and rascals. But what of that ? The

PROBLEMS OF THE SPIRITUAL.

same thing can be said of Religion, of the Medical
Profession, and of a host of other things. We must
discriminate between what is true and what is false.
Religion is not labelled as " imposture and humbug,"
because unbelievable dogmas, as parasites, have
fastened themselves upon it, and religious char-
latans have endangered its reputation. Nor are the
sciences of Medicine and Astronomy accounted as
nonsense, because there are quacks and fortune-
tellers.

The trickery and imposture which have sometimes
been associated with Spiritualism afford no argument
against the latter, but only against the falsification
of it. The true Spiritualist, no less than the true
Christian • i the true Scientist, deplores that the
truth he holds should at times be subject to the
invasion of misrepresentation and falsehood. But
so it is. The experience of the past has taught us
that no truth is so conditioned as to be safe-guarded
against an association with stupidity, error and evil.
The wise man is he who seeks for the truth, and is
not misled and made purblind by any falsehood he
may detect in company with it; but who dis-
criminates between the two, and separates the true
from the false.

///. The prohibition given by God to the
ancient Israelites, that no communication should
be held with " familiar spirits," is— to my mind—
a proof that such communication was, and is,
POSSIBLE. But does not the prohibition also imply
that ALL intercourse with the Spiritual World is
contrary to the will of God?

The first of these two conclusions is right ; the
other is wrong. If it be acknowledged that God
forbad persons to hold communication with spiritual
beings, it must also be acknowledged that this com-
munication could be effected ; unless we commit our
selves to the absurdity of supposing that the Al-
mighty solemnly charged men not to do that which
they could not possibly do. I f there be no such thing as
communion between beings in this world and beings
in the Spirit-World, then there would seem to be no
more sense in this prohibition than there would in

■i

PROBLEMS OF THE SPIRITUAL.

iip

one that commanded men not to jump over the
moon. The point is an important one in regard to
the attitude assumed towards Spiritualism by many
Christians. There are many good and earnest
persons who profess to believe the statements of the
Bible, and are also convinced that this prohibitory
command is a Divine one, who, nevertheless, scout
as being foolish the idea of communication with the
Spiritual. " The thing is an impossibility," say they.
" The Departed cannot under any circumstances or
any conditions re-establish intercourse with those
whom they left behind. An impassable barrier is
set up between us in this life and all others in Spirit-
life."

But, surely, this is a very illogical position to
take ! If it be true that there is this " impassable
barrier " between the two worlds, of course, it cannot
be passed. Then why tell persons not to pass it ?
A wholly unnecessary command! A restrictive
law is not required, except in respect to things which
men can do. Thus we account the prohibition itself
as implying the possibUity and fact of communication
with Spirit-beings.

There is another class of Christians, who perceive
the illogical position of those to whom we have just

PROBLEMS OF THE SPIRITUAL.

referred, and endeavour to explain the matter by
resorting to what, for convenience sake, we may
term the " Diabolic " theory. According to them,
the Devil is at the bottom of all intercourse between
us and the Other World. Spiritualism is therefore,
of course, his direct work.

They tell us that communication is possible
between terrestrial ar s;v ^- J beings; but that
the spiritual beings who ccrne mto contact with us
are all bad ones /—agents in the service of the great
and very powerful Devil. No good spirit, no de-
parted loved one, between whom and ourself a bond
of love exists, is ever allowed by God (we are told)
to come near us, to comfort us, help us, and affect
us for good by the projection to us of the distillations
of his ascending mind and spirit. Oh ! no ; such a
thought is supposed to be a disparagement of the
work and power of the Holy Ghost. (Though why
it should be so in that case, more than in the case
of those in this world who help and bless each other,
we cannot see.)

No ; only the evil spirits are permitted to come
to us ; the " barrier " between us and the Spiritual
World is impassable for all the good, but passable
for the crew of evil. "Did not God forbid all

PROBLEMS OF THE SPIRITUAL

!(-

intercourse with familiar spirits, because of this?"
ask they.

The answer which suggests itself to the ordinary,
common*sense individual is — " How strange ! how
very contradictory it seems, that God should let
the veil between this world and the Other be drawn
at all, if only the bad, and none of the good, are
suffered to pass through it to us ! "

Our friends have yet to learn that intercourse
with the Spiritual World involves exactly that which
is involved in our intercourse with persons belonging
to this world ; viz., we may come into contact with
the good, bad an*i indifferent. Society in the
Spirit-World is not, as some have supposed, com-
posed only of two great classes — the good and the
bad.

Between the conditions described by these two
terms he " all sorts and conditions " of spint-beings.
There are men and women passed into Spirit-life,
who exhibit ther aS much variety in mind, character
and spirit, as do the men and women who move
among us here. There are those who have passed
hence with the spiritual side of them wholly un-
developed. They are "of the earth, earthy."
Many of them, unfitted for the new life, are eager

I' "*
ii

PROBLEMS OF THE SPIRITUAL.

to re-establish relations with the old. There are
others in whom as yet the spiritual is but slowly
developing. These for a while, at all events, will
retain many of their imperfect moral characteristics
and their limitations of knowledge." Others who,
in the ascending scale, stand at different altitudes
of moral excellence, wisdom and spirituality. A
great mass of widely-differing individuals is that
inconceivable aggregation of beings in the Spiritual
World ; as widely-differing from one another in
knowledge, thought and cultivation as do the men
and women who constitute the population of a
continent.

Now, if this fact as to the variety wi. charac-
terizes life and experience in the Spir't-\ ,Jd be
realized, we shall be able to form some true idea of
the possibiUties connected with intercourse between
that World and this. The door between the two
worlds has been opened, — and is still open — in some
cases and under certain conditions. The denial of
that involves the rejection of the persistent testi-
mony of mankind throughout the centuries — a testi-
mony more persistent and emphatic to-day than
ever it has been — ; the rejection of the Bible state-
ments which affirm the fact, and, moreover, the

PROBLEMS OF THE SPIRITUAL.

itii

rejection of the results of careful modern scientific
investigation which go to verify the statements of
that Book. " Quite so," says the supporter of the
" Diabolic " theory, " there is communication to us
from the Spirit-World, but only the devils ever come
to us from it." "But why only they?" we ask.
Is it not opposed to all ideas of the fitness of things,
that God should permit the opening of the door of
the Sniritual only to let loose on us the beings who
will seek to harm us ? That is not what He does
when, in this lower earth-life, He opens the doors of
communication between us and others. That was
not what His Christ did when He opened the door of
the Spiritual on the Mount of Transfiguration and
in the Garden of Joseph. Through that open door
came no devils to men and women, but departed
Moses and Elijah and God's angels. What a dread-
ful state of affairs it would be, if God had granted us
in earth-life only to associate with the evil ! What
a fearful conception of God is that which thinks of
Him as opening the door of the Spiritual solely to
let loose the Devil and his crew on us ! An idea such
as this savours to us of dishonour to God.

How much more consistent is it to believe that
our Father-God, in granting to those who are in

PROBLEMS OF THE SPIRITUAL.

spirit-life the power of sometimes coming to us who
are in earth-Ufe, has granted it not only to the bad,
but also to the good and others ! And may it not be
that the reason why at times He allows to us in earth-
life this association with good, bad and indifferent
spirit-beings, is to bring home to our feebly- working
minds the true significances of Life Beyond ? And
may not another reason be, that the contact of such
with us will, in some way or another, be made to
contribute to God's great Purpose of good in regard
to them ? Suppose it be so — suppose these constitute
the two great objects for God's allowing of this con-
tact of the Spiritual with the Physical World,— then
how all-important becomes the matter !

From good, bad and indifferent spirits we may
realize great truths which, perchance, we did but
imperfectly realize from the earthly preachers and
teachers— viz., that the Other Life is but a develop-
ment from the earth-life ; that God's Law of Corre-
spondence is inviolable, making men and women
in spirit-life (for a while, at least) no more and no
less than they have made themselves to be in earth-
life; and that the pronouncement— " He that is
unjust, let him be unjust still, and he that is hojy,
let him be holy still "—is no mere sentence of punish-

PROBLEMS OF THE SPIRITUAL.

■1^

ment for the bad and reward for the good, but the
Divine proclamation to us that all reaping will
answer to the sowing. Yes, and these spirits, good
and bad and indifferent, may come to us as God's
Object-Lessons on these eternal truths. From those
poor, debased, earth-bound spirits, who have been
seen by many as haunting the scenes of their former
vice, with the desire for the low, the sensual and the
unspiritual still dominating them— we may learn,
better than from any manual on Hell-fire and dam-
nation, what an evilly-directed life really means.
From the frivolous, silly, uninformed spirits, who
startle us by their ignorance of those truths which
our better-trained soul both knows and accepts —
we may learn the danger— the awful danger of
starving in earth-life the spirit -part. Transferred
though they be to the World of Mind and Spirit,
their knowledge of God and Divine things is less,
as yet, than ours. Yes, and we may learn the same
great significances of life from those higher ones in
Spirit-life who come to us at times — those souls
who when on earth were loved and prized because,
like the Master, they helped and blessed and ex-
haled sweetness. They, too, come, because the
Spiritual Life is but a continuance, a development of

PROBLEMS OF THE SPIRITUAL.

the earth-life. D.;ath has not changed their being ;
it did but alter their environment. The same
thoughts of love, and the same desire to help and
bless are within them as of old. Their present has
been moulded by their past. Like departed Moses
on the Mount with Jesus, they show that the trend
of the mind on earth is the trend of the mind Beyond.
And what (as we said just now) if this opening of
the door of the Spiritual to these developed and
undeveloped ones on the Other Side, be made to
further God's purpose of good in respect to them !

The World of Spirit is no Province of life and
experience detached from and unrelated to this
Physical World. The two are correlated. The
former is as much a part of the vast Empire of our
Father-God, and as closely connected with this
Physical World, as India is a part of King Edward's
Empire and connected with England. Nay, more
so ; for we, while still living on earth, have our being
in two Worlds— the Physical and the Spiritual.

Moreover, this fact of the consolidarity of God's
universe— that no part of it is detached from any
other part, and that inter-dependence is the Divine
Law of ail biing— should make us realize that all
provision made by God for blessing is made in view

■m

PROBLEMS OF THE SPIRITUAL.

of the whole, and not in view of any pa. I only. The
true conception of the Christ is a magnificent one.
In the particular, He is God's Provision for blessing
mankind. True, but the blessing is to affect the
whole universe. How those words of St. Paul voice
this truth as to consolidarity — " That God might
gather together in one all things in Christ, both
which are in heaven and which are in earth ....
that He might fill all things " (Eph. i. lo v., and iv.
ID V.) ! How they dwarf into insignificance the
notions of some as to the non-salvabilit> of countless
myriads in the Empire of God.

And, of course, this view of the connectedness of
each sphere of life with every other sphere of life,
will considerably modify our idea as to why we
should be Christians. The raison d'Hre which is so
commonly given is, that we may thereby be saved
from a wrath to come, and receive a great blessing
for ourselves. That is not the true raison d'etre.
The blessing which comes to anyone, individually,
from union with Christ, was never meant to be an
end in itself. The blessing was given to be ex-
tended. That blessed one is not a detached being ;
he stands related to others — to the whole universe.
Never will he fulfil the reason . his calling, until

PROBLEMS OF THE SPIRITUAL.

somehow and somewhen, in 'his life or some other
life, he has caused his blessing, as a tributary stream
of effort for others' good, to run into that great
mainstream of God's Purpose of blessing all.

In the light of this truth of the connectedness of
each with all others, and of this world with the
Spiritual World, is it not likely that we on earth, by
prayer and uplifting thoughts at all times, and by
actual intercourse sometimes, may be able to help
and bless discamate ones ?

There is another reason for believing that we may
help these ones.

It arises from the fact of the enormous number
there must be on the Other Side who stand in need
of help. It must be so, unless we arc prepared to
think that Death for ever fixes the character and
unalterably determines the destiny of all who pass
thither. The brighter Theology of this age has
discarded the old notion that beings must remain
throughout Eternity what they are at the time of
physical dissolution. Though Death works no
miracle of moral transformation in regard to any,
the mercy and love of God puts no soul outside the
Purpose of advancement and ultimate Salvation.
According to the Master, the " lost " things arc not

PivOBLEMS OF THE SPIRlri'AL

, I

j'l'

for ever to remain " lost," nor arc the " il ad " things
never to be made " alive again."

Now, the vast majority of those w).r» nass from
carth-lifc into Spirit-life are either what Ch: i t would
have called "lost" or "dead" oner or uey are
undeveloped ones, mentally, morally j ,'' b|'r,fually.
Millions face the realities of the Li ...al World
with no sense of relationship to God, .net dead
or all but dead, to that which consti:ir- h,t 'v '' i^
spirit. Other millions there are who • r-wiic'^, h j.e
characters and whose spirits are such a- to m K' he
highest life impossible to them, '^o long is they remain
unridded of imperfection. Think of an enormous
ladder whose foot rests on the earth, and whose top
touches the summit of an Alp. The ladder repre-
sents the ascent to that possible moral and spiritual
Perfection, defined by Jesus in the words—" Ye
therefore shaM be perfect as your heavenly Father
is perfect" (Matt. v. 48 v.). Its topmost rung repre-
sents that promised Perfection ; its bottom-most
rung that point of moral and spiritual attainment
which is reached by the great bulk of mankind at the
time they pass into Spirit-life ; while the intervening
rungs of that ladder denote those spheres of asr.nsion
through which every soul must pass on its way to

PROBLEMS OF THE SPIRITUAL.

the goal of being. The illustration will give us some
idea of the greatness of the goal which a Father-God
has marked out for the creatures His Lovo enwraps.
The number of those rungs to be trotklen will
suggest the follv of neglecting, in the earth-life, the
teaching of our spirit-self to do the work of mounting
Godward ; and it will divest those words of the
Apost!. of that ring of hopelessness which a certain
Theology has imported into them, and will invest
them with another meaning — " Now is the accepted
time " ; the height is great, and the rungs are many !
Yes, and it may l-ad us to realize how great -how
inconceivably great— must be the multitude of dis-
carnate ones who cry to others — to us, perchance, —
who have reached the higher rungs, to help them
in their climbing upward.

An inconceivably gn at multitude ? Yes ; picture
it, if you can. It has been estimated that about
44,000 persons die on this earth in every month
of the year. Think of this Death-harvest of the
years, the centuries and the millenniums. Think
of that mighty stream of human souls which has
been pouring, and i-^ still pouring, into the World
of Spirit, and then ask yourself—" How many of
those souls have scalrd tlic laddt'-r and are ripe for

111

PROBLEMS OF THE SPIRITUAL.

Heaven ? " The answer will be — " Very few in
comparison with the hosts at the base of the
ladder."

Is it, then, a groundless belief to think that in a
universe bearing the Divine hall-mark of Consoli-
darity, we on the plane where the Spiritual and
Physical intermingle, may play some part in the
Divine Purpose of helping and blessing the World
of the Spiritual ? We think not. We dare believe
that that interview between the Christ in the Earth-
life and Moses and Elijah in the Spirit-life on that
mountain of Palestme, led the lawgiver and the
prophet to mount to higher rungs of Divine Know-
ledge. We know of actual cases, in which poor,
carthbound spirits have been seen and heard by
clairvoyant and clairaudient persons, and have
asked the latter for their prayers and uplifting
thought-influences. " Pray for me ! pray for me ! "
said one of these undeveloped ones from the World
of Spirit, to a Christian friend I know. " I will,"
was the reply— " every day I will pray that you
may find light and peace. Every time I kneel at
God's Holy Altar, too, I will pray for you." That
gentleman saw that spirit once again, and heard these
words—" I am not earth-bound now ; the desire for

PROBLEMS OF THE SPIRITUAL.

God has come ; the darkness has gone ; it was your
prayers for me which led me to pray."

But further, the fact of being able to help our
fellow-creatures in the Other World is in accordance
with that principle under which we know and see
the redemptive and uplifting work of God to be
carried on. No new principle of the Divine modus
operandi is introduced thereby. " God blesses man
through man," says the old adage, and the essential
being of no one is changed because of the transference
of him from the Physical to the Spiritual. God
blesses the ignorant, the undeveloped and the base
in this world through their contact with the more
enlightened, the more developed and better ones.
That Ls the principle which underlies aH missionary
effort and the work of social reclamation. Are we
prepared to say that God, while acting on this prin-
ciple in regard to saving work in this world, disallows
it in regard to that Spiritual World with which we
are so closely connected ? If the fact of inter-
course between that World and this be admitted,
/and the foundation-truth of the Christian Religion
would be removed, if it be denied) is it not the most
reasonable of all thoughts to suppose that behind
God's allowance of the intercourse lies His purpose

li!

'^i;f:

.:!.,

PROBLEMS OF THE SPIRITUAL.

of blessing man through man ? The man who is
God's instrument of blessing may be in this world
and the man to be blessed in the Other World ; but
that seems to us to make no difference in the jiwer
of the one to help the other.

The consolidarity of the universe remains. No
part of it is independent of any other part. God and
His Love and His power for uplifting are not shut
off from any quarter of it. The Psalmist was right
when he said that if men ascended up into Heaven
they could find Him there, or made their bed in hell,
there also would He be (Ps. cxxxix. 8 v.). This
world and the Other are correlated. Influences for
good and evil are streaming in from the Spiritual to
the Physical, and vice versa. The good and Christlike
in Spirit-life may project their mind and spirit-
impulses upon us in Earth-life, and at times may
visibly manifest themselves to us, as the glorified
departed " fellowservant " did to the aged St. John;
while the good and noble on earth may. by prayer
for the departed, by the sending forth to them of
concernful thoughts, of soul-impulses impregnated
with the quickening power of a Divine Love passed
from God through them—help on to light and re-
freshment and advancement poor souls who have

PROBLEMS OF THE SPIRITUAL.

crossed the frontier-line of the Spiritual, undeve-
loped and unsaved.

I know, perfectly well, what some who read these
lines will say. I can voice their reply in two words
— " Danger— Devil ! " I have dealt with that reply
in another chapter of this volume. Here, I will only
add this. Why do you not exclaim the same thing
in respect to all Evangelistic work ? Is there no
danger of baneful influence to those who for the
cause of Christ and the love of souls suffer them-
selves to come into contact with all sorts of undeve-
loped ones — the revolting savage and the debased
dweller in the filthy back-slum ? Why believe in
the principle of the bad being raised by their con-
tact with the good, as it applies to this world, and
deny it in its application to the Other and more
needful World ? God does not work under con-
flicting sets of principles in different spheres.

i
,1

All that has been said above as to the possibility
of and the reason for this intercourse between the
earth- world and the Other World, will make it easier
to answer the question which stands at the head of
this chapter — " Does not the prohibition given to

PROBLEMS OF THE SPIRITUAL.

>4.

the ancient Israelites imply that all intercourse with
the Spiritual World is contrary to the will of God ? "
We answer-" No ; it does but imply that, at a par-
ticular time and undor particular circumstances,
such intercourse was forbidden to certain persons
for special reasons." It does not follow that, if God
forbid a thing at one time. He forbids it for all
time.

Circumstances may alter the case. Take an
instance. According to the Mosaic law, the
Israelites were prohibited from intermarrying with
foreign races. The regulation was a good one, in
view of the ^act that the Israelites were to bear
witness to the true principles of religion and morality,
and the foreign races were steeped in Polytheism
and vice. The prohibition was a necessity of the
time. But is all intermarriage between nations,
therefore, to be accounted wrong? Is this law,
which was made for special circumstances, to debar
all persons from marrying foreigners ? For suffi-
cient and good reasons, God may even for a while
close the door of the Spiritual, as when in the time
of Eli " there was no open vision," or during- the few
centuries preceding the birth of Jesus, no exalted
spirit seems to have come to men, and no earthly

PROBLEMS OF THE SPIRITUAL.

teacher received that influx of Spiritual inspiration
which could constitute him a prophet. And yet, at
the coming of the Saviour, the door was opened
again, and inter-communion between the Spiritual
World and this marked the earth-lifn history of
the Son of Man. If the prohibition given to the
Israelites denoted that all intercourse with the
World of Spirit is contrary to the will of God, how
very strange and inconsistent that angels and
departed men should have so identified themselves
with God's Christ and His mission on earth ! Can
anything, more than this intermingling of the
Spiritual and the Physical in the time of Jesus,
establish the fact that all intercourse with the Other
Side is not forbidden by God ?

We have to consider the circumstances which
rendered that prohibition to the Israelites a necessary
one. The social and moral condition of that race at
that time was a very low one. The people had been
but lately emancipated from all the demoralizing
influences of Egyptian slavery. Their views of God
were crude and chaotic, and their religious ideas
showed the constant tendency to become assimilated
to the ideas which characterized the religion of
Egypt, and the still baser forms of the religions

PROBLEMS OF THE SPIRITUAL.

of those nations with whom they came into contact
after the Exodus. The first commandment—" Thou
Shalt have no other gods before Me "—indicates the
Israelites i.roneness to Polytheism ; while the com-
mands not to kill, not to steal and so on, denote that
the standard of morality among them at that time
was of no high type. They had been chosen, in
the Divine ordering of things, to pioneer in the
world the cause of true Religion and righteousness,
but as yet mentally, morally and socially they were
undeveloped. They were susceptible to every in-
fluence hostile to a true conception of God, and in
danger from every contact pertaining to the moral
undevelopment from which they were slowly
emerging. Both the hostile influence and danger
soon presented themselves in a special form. In the
progress of the Israelites to the land in which they
were to subsequently settle themselves, they en-
countered foes who resisted the invasion of their
territory. Thousands of these foes were slain in the
sanguinary encounters which ensued. Thousands
and thousands of human souls, ignorant, morally
base, and filled with the feelings of hatred and
revenge against their slayers, were violently hurled
by the Israelites into Spirit-life. Some among the

PROBLEMS OF THE SPIRITUAL.

Israelites were "mediums" — their psychic powers
were so developed as to make it possible for the ones
in Spirit-life to re-establish through them communi-
cation with their persecutors. Through these open
doors came a host of malignant ones, thirsting for
retaliation, and eager to harm. There was but one
safeguard for a people, so little prepared for the
attack of evil, and who, moreover, had themselves
provoked the attack. The door must be closed ;
the communication between the Spiritual and the
Physical be broken in that particular case and under
those particular circumstances. Hence the prohibi-
tion. It was given not to proscribe all communica-
tion between this world and the Other, but to meet
the exigences of a particular case.

But lastly, those who account this prohibition
given to the ancient Israelites, as implying that all
intercourse with the Spiritual World is contrary to
God's will, prove too much. They cut away the
foundation upon which the Jewish and Christian
Religions rest. Communication between this world
and the Spiritual is the fact upon which prophets
and apostles rehed for their credentials. Without
such communication, Christianity, on its own
showing, would possess no evidences of its preter-

PROBLEMS OF THE SPIRITUAL.

61,.

natural origin, its spiritual inspiration or Divine
vocation in the world at all. It has been accepted by
men because of its vital relationship to the Spiritual.
The history of the Hebrew race as narrated in the
Old Testament, is indissolubly bound up with the
fact of men's contact with the World of Spirit.

Are we to suppose that the experiences of that race,
in regard to spiritual visitants and phenomena,
were in opposition to the will and command of God ?
There would seem to be an inconsistency in God's
proscribing intercourse with the Spiritual World,
and then employing that intercourse as the foremost
means of teaching men the highest truth.

Again, in the New Testament, the life and work of
Jesus and the Apostles are inseparably connected
with spiritual intercourse. From the birth of the
Saviour to His withdrawal of Himself into the plane
of sublimated and ascended life, inter-communion
between this world and the Spirit- World marks the
whole track of His experience. And so, too, with
respect to the Apostles and others associated with
them. Almost every chapter of the Acts contains
the record of a spiritual sign or wonder, an angeUc
visit, a spiritual vision or a spiritual voice. All
this is inexplicable and contradictory, if the prohibi-

PROBLEMS OF THE SPIRITUAL.

I i

tion, given under special circumstances, against
communion with the Spirit-World, denotes that the
thing itself is forbidden by God. The contradiction
disappears, if it be realized that God's opening of the
door of the Spiritual has been the great means by
which He has instructed man in Divine truth ;
and that His reason for commanding certain ones
not to open that door, was because the great Law
of Spiritual Attraction must always operate, and
the danger to those morally and spiritually un-
developed ones of attracting to them evil influences,
was greater than any likehhood of drawing the
good.

IV. How can it be explained that many of the com-
munications alleged to come from discarnate beings
are unsatisfactory, misleading and untruthful?

This is a question submitted by one who admits
the possibility of communication between us and
beings in Spirit-life, but rejects, as being whoUy
subversive of the main-principle of the Christian
Religion, the " Diabolic " theory, viz., that all such
communication is " the work of the Devil." The
difficulty confronts him of accounting for the fact
that some of the communications received are of the
character he has described. The Questioner per-
ceives how illogical is the position of those who
accept the Christian Religion, and yet regard as
incredible all communication between us and beings
in Spirit-life. He is quite right. What, we ask,
could be more inconsistent than to profess to im-
plicitly believe that after death Moses, Samuel, our
Lord, the saints who appeared to many in Jerusalem

PROBLEMS OF THE SPIRITUAL.

at the first Easter-time, and the Christian brother
who visited St. John at Patmos— that these mani-
fected themselves to, and conversed with, the
dwellers on eai '.h a few himdred years ago, but that
since then such an occurrence has been an im-
possibility ; nay ! that the mere thought of it is an
absurdity! We argue— if juch things really did
take place in Bible-times (and the credibility of the
Gospel narratives is destroyed, if they did not), why
can they not occur in the twentieth century ? What
was possible then is possible now. God's universe has
undergone no change of constitution. If there be
no intermingling of the life of the Spirit- World with
the life of this world at all times, we have little or no
grounds for believing that there ever has been such
an intermiiigling. " As it was in the beginning, is now,
and ever shall be." These Christians who deny the
present possibility of communion with spirit-beings
are piously shocked if an Agnostic or a Materialist
asserts that all the Bible-records of such contacts
are " nonsense." But why be shocked ? Those
persons who take that position cannot consistently
find fault with the Agnostic. He and they both
account as incredible the thought of communion
between the two worlds. He is the more consistent.

PROBLEMS OF THE SPIRITUAL.

He says the thing itself is absurd; it never does,
and it never did, happen. They say, of course,
it hai^iJened long ago, for hundreds and hundreds of
years ; but it could not possibly happen now. Those
were Bible-times, and all was very different then
from what it has been since. We are told that every-
thing the Scriptures state concerning the contact
of spiritual beings with men is reasonable, and on no
account to be doubted; but that to acknowledge
that anything of a like character could take place
now is most unreasonable and incredible.

Now do let us as Christians be logical ! If com-
munication between us and the Spiritual World be
an impossibility at the present time, and has been
so ever since the times of the Bible, then the
Agnostic is right ; we have no grounds for believing
that it existed as that Book declares. Consequently,
we must reject the Bible-accounts of Spiritual
phenomena as fabrications. On the other hand, if
such communication is a present-day fact, we have
an assurance that the principle upon which the
Christian Religion has been based is a true one. The
good folk to whom we are alluding say—" We believe
in the long-ago communication between the two
worlds, because the Bible asserts it was so." " Quite

PROBLEMS OF THE SPIRITUAL.

SO," we reply, " and this means that although yon,
of course, had no experience of these happenings,
and have no means of v«.rifying the statements made
concerning them, you, nevertheless, unquestioningly
believe in them?" "Of course, we do," is the
rejoinder, " the Bible vouches for the facts."

Well, those who believe in a present-day commu-
nication between the two worlds have a far strong, r
case for their belief than have the ones who behi ve
that such communication existed only in the olden
times. In the first place, the testimony of the Bvblf
in regard to intercourse with the Spiritual is vt ly
small, in comparison with the testimony which has
been borne to the same thing apart from that Book,
The Bible is a selection of writings brought together
by a Church Council in a.d. 400, and constituted
the Sacred Canon. The writings comprise the
statements of a small body of persons who wrote at
different times during a period covering many cen-
turies. From the time of the closing of the Canon to
the present moment, hundreds and thousands of
writers have narrated their experiences of the
Spiritual, as the Bible-writers did ; and in a great
number of instances the experiences of both classes
of writers are coincident. The testimony borne by

PROBLEMS OF THE SPIRITUAL.

m. i

f^"

the men of to-day who have scientifically studied the
phenomena of the Spiritual, shows how, point by
point, the present-day phenomena resemble those of
which we read in the Bible.

Moreover, we have an enormous amount of testi-
mony from living persons who have had their ex-
periences of spiritual things, and have never com-
mitted those experiences to writing. We ask, why
accept the testimony of a few men who lived in " the
hoary past," and account it most reliable, when an
overwhelmingly greater mass of similar testimony,
given subsequently and also at the present time, is
rejected as unreliable and worthless ? We have not
one tithe of the evidence for the fact that intercourse
with the Spiritual existed in Bible-times, that we
have for the fact that it exists to-day. How absurd
for any Christian to go to a non-believer and tell
him that he must accept as absolute truth the state-
ments of the Bible concerning spiritual happenings ;
and in the next breath to inform him that all present-
day occurrences of the same order are naught but
the outcome of distorted imagination !
I In the next place, there is, of course, no possi-
bility of verifying the statements of the Bible-
writers. We cannot i.ome into contact with the ones

PROBLEMS OF THE SPIRITUAL.

who had the spiritual experiences. We can simply
take their word for what they narrate. The case for
present-day spiritual intercourse is in a very much
stronger position. There are numbers of persons
living among us to-day — ^men distinguished in
science and culture — whose word we should not
dream of doubting ; men whose experiences of the
Spiritual have been similar to many of those of the
Bible-writers. We can receive from their own lips
the accounts of what they have experienced. And
more still than this ; it is possible for every open-
minded enquirer as to the truth of Spiritual com-
munion, to obtain for himself the proof that the
door between the two worlds is still open.

The Questioner, therefore, as a Christian, is quite
right in dissenting from those other Christians who
say that it is a mark of piety to believe that Spiritual
intercourse existed long ago, but that it is impious
and foolish to think it can exist now.

But what perplexes many who acknowledge the
fact of present-day intercourse between us and
spirit-beings, is that the communications received
are often of an unsatisfactory character. These
communications do not come up to the precon-
ceived idea of what they should be. Many have

PROBLEMS OF THE SPIRITUAL.

f 1 i •

no conception of a spiritual being, except as an angel
or a devil. It never enters the ordinary religious
mind that there are millions in the Spirit- World
who, ior a while at least, are extraordinarily like the
men and women in this world. " How absurd,"
say some, " to suppose that beings from the Other
World should come to us and talk ' common-places,'
or display ignorance and mental incapacity, or in
some cases even tell lies ! " But why should it be
absurd to suppose this ? We are inclined to think
that the absurdity lies in expecting that, of necessity,
all communications from discamate beings must be
of a high order and tone. We do not suppose that
if the repentant robber who was crucified with our
Lord, had appeared after death to persons in this
world, as others mentioned in the Gospel narrative
did — that his mental tone and conversation would
have been of tlw lofty character of that of Moses on
the Mount of Transfiguration. We believe it would
have been the tone and conversation of one who had
just learned the A, B. C. of higher thoughts and
better life ; and lao more. We regard it also as
bordering on the absurd, to suppose that the
ordinary non-cultured and non-developed ones who
depart this Ufe, and afterwards manifest themselves

PROBLEMS OF THE SKRITUAL.

■J

to those left behind, should come with no traces of
that which had previously characterized them. It
is not reasonable. The idea is founded on a false
notion of what is. The Bible itself and our know-
ledge of the laws of mind and being exclude such a
supposition. The established order of things would
be broken, if it were so ; the connection between
sowing and reaping, between cause and effect would
be at an end.

Now, a very common notion concerning the Other
World is, that in passing into it we undergo at once
a complete change of mind, character and disposition.
The one who in this life may have been very silly,
very ignorant, or very morally and spiritually im-
perfect, is pictured as becoming soberminded, wise
and virtuous, as soon as ever he crosses the threshold
of Spirit-life. All frivoUty and light-mindedness
will instantaneously disappear, it is said, in that
World where all is intense reality ; all ignorance will
cease in a light which reveals everything ; and moral
imperfection— well, that, too, will disappear with the
physical body.

Of course, those who hold this view of the
tremendous transforming power of Death on our
being, regard this sudden acquirement of mental

PROBLEMS OF THE SPIRITUAL.

I * .

! Ifi f

and moral excellence as only accruing to those who
die in the condition of " saved souls." Death, they
suppose, works a transformation in the case of the
other class ; but it is a transformation into a con-
dition which is hopelessly and irretrievably bad.
For the " unsaved " ignorant and sinful ones, Death
gives the stereotyping touch for an endless Satanic
life. It is an awful thought ! a thought which makes
one shudder ; but it is an idea which hundreds of
thousands of sincere men have attached to the
Religion of Jesus, and labelled "Orthodoxy."
Yes, and it is the thought which has caused many
who acknowledge the fact of spirit-return, to account
as a marauding force of the Devil those poor, earth-
bound spirits who sometimes come to us, with all
the disfigurement of a neglected past upon them ;
the ones who, although they have moved off the
stage of the Temporal, are less wise, less good, and
less spiritually-developed than we are.

Some of the truth-obscuring traditions of the past
must be unlearned. Death is no Transformer of
the inner being of anyone ; nor does change of
environment suddenly make a person excellently
good or hopelessly evil. Death strips from off a
man that physical vehicle through which for a while

PROBLEMS OF THE SPIRITUAL.

he expressed himself; but it does not alter him.
It transfers him to another plane of life ; but it effects
no change in the bent of his will, the tone of his
character and the nature of his desires. He com-
mences his new phase of experience in the Spirit-
World at precisely the mental and moral point he
had touched when he left the earth-life. If in this
world he was silly, or ignorant, or vicious, or mi-
spiritual, he will be so in the Other World ; until the
disciplining Love of God shall have worked its
results, and the soul, previously unborn to the
Divine, shall feel the tlirill of quickening life, and
shall set itself with the tide of spiritual being which
makes for the upward and for God.

Yes, and the consequences of the past may be
such, that only slowly and with difficulty can the
mind be brought to hate the alienation, the shame
and the swine, and to say — " I will arise, and go to
my Father."

The believer in the Bible should have no diffi-
culty in realizing that Death will not change the mind,
the character and the disposition. The Samuel
who appeared after death was the same in thought
and feeling as he had been before he entered Spirit-
life. His words spoken as a discamate one were

!!'•«

PROBLEMS OF THE SPIRITUAL.

hi-'i

but the echo of what he had said when in the flesh.
Departed Moses, too, in his converse with Jesus, at
that rendezvous where beings in earth-life and spirit-
life met, showed by the subject on which he spoke,
that his discamate mind was in the same groove as
his incarnate mind had been long before. The
Saviour, too, in those manifestations of Himself
after He had passed out of the earth-life, showed, by
the words He spoke to men and women who were
privileged to see Him, that none of the characteristics
of His beautiful mind and spirit had undergone
change or modification. The first Easter greeting—
" Mary ! "—denoted that the bond of friendship and
affection had not been broken. His words — "All
hail ! " " Peace be unto you," " I ascend to my
Father and your Father " ; His exposition of truth as
He walked unrecognized with those two men on the
road to Emmaus ; His special appearance to St.
Peter; His significant thrice-repeated question—
" Lovest thou Me ? " and His reiterated charge to
that same Apostle— " Feed my lambs "—" Feed
my sheep"— all showed that entrance into spirit-
life had not altered the Jesus Himself. The old
love, the old longing to lighten burdened hearts, the
old desire to impart peace, the old passion to make

PROBLEMS OF THE SPIRITUAL.

men realize that God » their Father, the old yearn-
ing that they might understand truth, the remem-
brance of what had happened, and the principle which
had dominated the whole of his earth-life — concern
for others — all this remained unchanged in Jesus
after death.

Years after this glorious Easter-tide of intercourse
between the two worlds, a faithful servant of the
Master wrote that he had " a desire to depart and to
be with Christ." This statement of St. Paul has been
taken by some to denote that Death will usher all
believing souls into an immediately-acquired con-
dition of perfection. " Prayers for the Faithful
Departed," say some, " are wholly unnecessary :
they have reached the goal ; they go to be with
Christ; St. Paul said so." Well, we do not believe
that non-developed Christians — the ones who are
selfish, petty, bad-tempered and lack the sweetness
of love— go at death to "be with Christ," in the
sense in which the Apostle meant the words. St.
Paul was of a very different class from such. But
suppose they do ! The robber who died on the Cross
went that very day to be with Jesus in Paradise ;
bat does that involve that that man, with his
selected and perverted past, in a few moments or

PROBLEMS OF THE SPIRITUAL.

l\\

a few hours, acquired perfection of mind and
character ? That St. Paul and other developed souls
should go at death to be with our Lord is only the
corollary of their previous life. It is only in accord
with the Divine law that one reaps as he sows. It
implies no transformation of being, in the act of
d3dng. Mentally, morally and spiritually, such
blessed ones at death become no more ilian they were.
The changed environment does but afford them en-
hanced possibilities of adding glory on glory to their
moral being, as their fuller life rolls on. St. Paul's
expectation of being with Christ as soon as he should
leave this life, was based on the fact that for him
" to live (here) was Christ." In a word, then, the
Bible teaches that no moral miracle is worked by
Death, but that men and women on entering Spirit-
life are what they were on leaving earth-life.

Now, if this truth expressed above be realized,
there will be no difficulty in understanding why
some of the communications received from the Other
Side are unsatisfactory, misleading and even lying.
Many attach to the utterance of a spiritual being an
importance and authority which they would not
dream of attaching to the utterance of any earthly
speaker. But why ? Do they not know that the

PROBLEMS OF THE SPIRITUAL.

World of Spirit holds men and women whose mental
and moral conditions are just as varied as are the
conditions of men and women here ? There, are to
be found good, bad and indifferent ones, some en-
lightened, others but partially so, and many, as yet
ignorant of Divine truth, and irresjjonsive to the
vibrations of goodness. Theie, are to be found
those to whom cling the thoughts, instincts and
tendencies which have been persistent in the earth-
life. The physical body has been laid aside, but the
character has been retained. The ones who have been
debased, deceitful and untruthful on earth, possess
the same pre-disposition and potentiality, until the
judgments of God shall have awakened them to
better things.

The closing words of the Canon of Scripture are
no declaration of a vindictive God ; hut a statement of
what must be under the inviolable law of Cause and
Effect—" He that is unrighteous, let him do un-
righteousness still ; and he that is filthy, let him be
made filthy still ; and he that is righteous, let him
do righteousness still." (Rev. xxii. 11 v. Revised
Version.)

In the face of this truth, how foolish to treat any
statement as authoritative and true, simply and

PROBLEMS OF THE SPIRITUAL.

Ih <!

solely because it comes to us from the Other World.
And yet there are many who do so. If a com-
municating spirit should declare that the great
verities of the Christian Religion are not to be
believed, that, in itself, is quite sufhcient in the case
of some to cause those verities to be discredited.
But that is a very illogical j)osition to assurne.
The communicator may be an ignorant one, a
deceiv- r, or a liar. In this world we come into
contact with such persons, but we do not dream of
accepting as truth all that they tell us, simply on
the grounds of its being their ipse dixit. No, we
exercise our judgment, and estimate the worth of
any statement made, by giving due weight to the
fact that onr informant may be ignorant, misled,
or untruthful in ref \rd to the matter about which he
'-.peaks.

In just such a sensible way should we treat all
communications which come to us from the Other
Side. They may be true or they may be false.
There are ignorant ones there ; tliose who have
carried their old habits and predispositions with
them into spirit-life, and who still try to deceive,
to he and to mislead. Earth-bound, and not in
tune with the higher life of the Spiritual, they find

PROBLEMS OF THE SPIRITUAL. 67

avenues open to them whereby they can re-establish
their connection with the Physical. Are we to
believe and to account as authoritative all they may
tell us ? Not if we be wise ; not if we obey the in-
junction of that Apostle who had a personal ex-
perience of the Spirit-World, before he had severed
his connection with the Physical World. (See
2 Cor. xii. I to 4 v.) He bade us beware of
" seducing spirits." We must listen to the counsel
of one— another Apostle of our Lord Jesus Christ—
the man who s;.w and heard Jesus, Moses and a
Christian fellow-labourer after their departure from
this world. "Beloved," wrote he, "believe not
every spirit, but test (,Tor,/i«:,rf) the spirits whether

they are of God Every spirit that con-

fesseth that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is of
God ; and every spirit that confesseth not that
Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is not of God "
(i John iv. 1—3 v.).

Are we to suppose, if a spirit came to us and told
us that God had commissioned him to be "a lying
spirit in the mouth of all his prophets," in order to
compass the physical destruction of a wicked man,
that that spirit was speaking the truth ? We
should know at once that he was a deceiver and a

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PROu. EMS OF THE SPIRITUAL.

liar ; because for God to forbid lying and then to
sanction and enjoin it, would be on the part of God
a breach of the law of righteousness.

A personal friend of mine, who is clairvoyant and
clairaudient and possesses great psychic power, and
who is, moreover, a Christian and highly cultured,
has received many audible and written communica-
tions from spirit-beings, of a high order, in the same
way as the seers of old did. That person was one
day much distressed and perplexed at being told by
a spiritual communicator, that he (the spirit) had
had' no reason to alter or modify the views he had
held in earth-life— viz., that the Christian Religion
was not true. It seemed so incredible to my friend
that a being in spirit-life should be ignorant of a
matter which, if true, is of such vital importance to
himself and others. " Surely," said he, " the state-
ment of that spirit suggests the thought that the
belief we hold may not be right ! " Our answer is,
that such a statement points to no conclusion of the
Christian ReUgion being untrue ; but only to the
fact that one in spirit-life was still unenlightened in
regard to higher truth ; that the consequences of
indifference, prejudice, ignorance and irreligion in
this world, had blinded a poor soul in the Beyond to

PROBLEMS OF THE SPIRITUAL.

the Light of God as it is manifested in the Jesus Who
here and there reveals it.

" A misleading spirit ! " say some. " Yes," we
reply, " if vve who know the fuller truth let him mis-
lead us. But not so, if we measure him by the
Christ." The authority of the Jesvis of earth-life,
or the Jesus of Anastasis-Ufe, will be greater to us
than the authority of any spirit who may come to
us from Behind the Veil. We do not, in this world,
surrender our faith, and alter our convictions of truth,
at the bidding of an unenlightened and non-deve-
loped " casual " who may cross our path.

" A im7— that one ! " say others. " No," we
again reply, " only a jx>or soul living in * the dark-
ness without ' ; reaping the consequences of past
neglect and wilfulness ; not yet awakened to truth ;
not yet drawn to the Christ. Curse hint not, though
you count him an enemy. The cursing-age for those
who believe in the Great Lover of human souls is
fast passing away. Discourage his visits to you, ii
you be not strong enough to help him 10 God and
light, or b_ weak enough for his ignorance to im-
peril your faith in Christian truth ; but pray for him,
tell him to pray ; and tell him, too, that other spirits,
wiser than he^ grander and more developed than he.

lii;

70 PROBLEMS OF THE SPIRITUAL.

have come to some of us dwellers on earth from God's
spheres of higher and highest Spiritual-life, to help
us and uplift us ; to tell us that the unattuned and
un-Christlike soul cannot know the greatest truths
of God, and that only as the soul of man is permeated
with Love, and is brought thereby into union with
the Christ Who is the Embodiment of Divine Love,
can it know the all of Truth, and reach the destined
end of being."

V. Is there a danger in attending Stances, on the
ground that at such meetings evil and deceiving spirits
may be attracted ?

There is ; and we have to rcnsider more parti-
cularly the character of that danger and the con-
ditions out of which it arises. The possibiUty of
evil and deceiving spirits coming into communica-
tion with persons living in the earth-life has been
discussed in the foregoing Article. It has been
pointed out that the mental and moral condition of
persons in the Spirit-World cannot be defined by the
two terms— •' good " and "bad." Between these
two extremes there lie every conceivable type of mind
and character. There are numbers of spirit-men
and women, who may rightly be described as evil ;
though not in the sense of the popular idea that they
are non-hu . beings ; a malignant race distinct from
humanity, and known as demons. They are evil
in the same sense as those persons in this world are

PROBLEMS OF THE SPIRITUAL.

; ' I

spoken of as evil, not when they are irretrievably
b^d, with no point whatever of goodness within
them ; but when in character and life they are more
attuned to what is wicked than to what is good.
We describe as evil the immoral, drunken and de-
based person, the one of low tastes and habits, the
scoffer at Religion and virtue, and the one who
find} a delight in lying, deceiving, and physically
or mentally harming others. Not all of good has
been extinguished in such ones, .ut the evil is pre-
dominant. There are beings in the Spirit-World
01 this description, who sometimes come to us.
They are not devils; they are discarnate human
beings who are undeveloped, unenlightened, and
sufficiently morally bad to justify us in calling them
"evil" spirits. We do not believe that they will
everlastingly remain as such; we think they will
advance. They are earth-bound in their ideas, their
tastes and their seekings. They left the earth-life
unfitted for the Spirit-life, and their instincts and
longings gravitate towards the former rather than
towards the latter. It is only in harmony with the
better Theological thought of the present day, and
with the recorded utterance of the Saviour as to
"seeking and saving tht lost," to think that the

PROBLEMS OF THE SPIRITUAL.

judgmenk of God will cause them to rise from this
condition. Nay, further, we -ill venture to say
that the reason why such eviUy-conditioned ones
as these are at times permitted to renew their rela-
tionship with the Physical, is that they, by the very
experiences they obtain through such renewal, may
realize the futility of remaining earth-bound, and
have enkindled in them the desire for beiter life.

A pex n who possessed in a very high degree the
gift of clairvoyance, once told me that often as he
passed the open door of gin-palaces in London and
elsewhere, he could see spiritual beings intermingling
with the half-drunken men and women who were
thronging the drinking bars. Why were those
spirits permitted to be there ? it may be asked. We
may account for it in two ways. First, the great
law of affinity— the law which attracts like to like
—was operating in regard to them. By their habits
and mode of living while on earth, those spirits had
moulded for themselves a certain character, and
had so identified themselves with base things, as to
make the taste and craving for those things the
controlling power of their mind and the determining
principle of their actions. While in the flesh, they
had been drunkards and companions of the lewd and

PROBLEMS OF THE SPIRITUAL.

depraved. After death, they found themselves un-
changed, except that the physical body, through
which the perverted mind and will had expressed
themselves, was gone. Earth-bound, and with, as
yet, no desire for, or possibility of attaining, higher
thoughts and higher experiences, they were drawn
by an impulse, which they had no power or wish
to resist, viz., to re- visit the haunts and associates
connected with their past Ufe of vice. As dis-
carnate ones, they themselves are no longer able to
indulge in the intoxication of the grossnesses and
vices of the physical ; but a certain satisfaction i ;
derived from mingling with and inciting others who
can still do so. After death they have gone, as it
was said of Judas, " to ti.eir own place." The evil
of two worlds meet in such a scene as we have just
described.

The other way in which we may account for discar-
nate ones being allowed to re-associate themselves with
evil physical surroundings, is as has already been
suggested. It may be one of the means, one of the
judgments of a Father-God, whereby His debased
creatures may learn the folly, the futility and the
horror of persisting in a course marked by the per-
version of the mind and spirit. It may be one of

PROBLEMS OF THE SPIRITUAL.

His methods of bringing those wretched one?, to see
that no satisfaction, no sense of hope and restfulness
can come to any soul until the thoughts have been
averted from the evil and turned towards good.
That beautiful parable told by Jesus justifies this
thought. Those very experiences of the Prodigal
which connected him with what was base, degraded
and shameful, brought him at length to the point of
wishing for better things, and of arising and going
to his father.

Now, we have dwelt upon the fact of this law of
being— this principle which operates, we believe,
throughout the whole universe— viz., that " like
attracts like," because it is inseparably connected
with all that may take place in regard to Stances.
What is a S^anc^j ? It is a sitting on the part of
persons for tb'' >'r-x)se of obtaining communica-
tions from sp ^,s. What class of communi-
cators will bt .ed thereby ? it is naturally
asked. " Devils, only devils ! " reply some, whose
theology is characterized by a super-abundance of
the Satanic element. "That is wrong, of course,"
rejoins the Questioner, " but will not such meetings
attract evil and deceiving spirits ? " We answer
that that will depend entirely on the tone of the mind

■ 1

PROBLEMS OF THE SPIRITUAL.

and the character of the sitters. " Like attracts
like." At one Stance there may be drawn evil and
deceiving spirits ; at another, good and enlightening
ones ; at a third, mediocre beings who are neither
very wise and good, nor very ignorant and bad ;
while at some Stances the good and indifferent from
the Other Side may both alike make the effort to
express themselves.

If the circle be composed of those who are frivolous,
spiritually undeveloped and ignorant of higher
truth, the spirits who will feel the ai ractive force,
and will respond to it, if the door of communication
be open for them, will be similar in mind to those
who invite them. To look for communications of
an exalted nature from such, is as absurd as it would
be for a company of ignoramuses to invite another
ignoramus into their circle, and expect the latter to
enlighten them on subjects concerning which he
knows nothing.

If the circle comprise those whose moral tone is
low, and whose ideas and tastes are essentially of
" the earth, earthy," the spirits who avail them-
selves of their mediumship will be of the same type
as they are. It causes astonishment sometimes
that spirits who come to a ciicle coiaj^KJsed of irre-

PROBT.EMS OF THE SPIRITUAL.

ligious, worldly-minded individuals, should say
nothing but the barest commonplaces, and nought
that has the stamp of spiritual knowledge and cul-
ture. " How incredible," says someone, " that a
l)eing from the Other Life should talk iu that way!"
"How incredible," we rejoin, "seeing his condition,
that he could talk in any other way ! " " Like
attracts like." H you are able to diagnose the
character and disposition of those who draw him to
their midst, you will be able pretty accurately to
diagnose his character and disposition.

Again, if the circle be made up wholly of those
whose minds and lives are in tune with spiritual
things, and who approach the subject reverently
and prayerfully, the law of attraction will draw from
the Other Side only those spirits whose minds are
f'sponsive to the minds of the sitters. They will
be able to impart to us, not full knowledge of higher
truths, but much which is advance of our own
knowledge. It will be in tl.^ir power to guide, to
cheer, to bless, and to stimulate us in our efforts to
grasp God and goodness.

I have been present at many Seances of this
description — held in the house o' a friend, who has
himself now passed Beyond the Veil. Those present

PROBLEMS OF THE SPIRITUAL.

were all devout arid prayerful persons, and the
meetings were always opened with earnest prayer
that light and blessing might he vouchsafed, and
that no undesitablc or evil influence might be allowed
to intrude. And what was the outcome ? At those
meetings I have seen the manifestations of spiritual
presences, and heard from my friend in trance-
condition (in which state i believe his mind to have
been controlled by a mind outside himself) such
thoughts and ideas and magnificent conceptions of
life, as he, unaided, was unable either to think or
express.

Again, at a Stance the sitters may exhibit dis-
similarity in regard to mind and character. Some
may be attuned to the drawing to the circle of good
and developed spirits, while some may be an attract-
ing power on non-developed and even evil spirits.
What then ? The result will be unsatisfactory.
Confusion will arise. The presence of the spiritual' •-
minded sitter or sitters in the circle may draw the
developed spirit-visitant ; but it will be difficult for
him to express himself. The conditicus vill be un-
favourable to his doing so. Anotlier uifluence will
be working against him. If, as regards the sitters,
the predominating influence be on th" side of the

PROBLEMS OF THE SPIRITUAL.

unspiritual, then the chances are that the Seanrc
will be controlled by the lower class of communicators.
The good control will hnvo suffered a repulse.

We have been asked, again r.nd again — " Do you
n commend that anyone should attend Seances ?
We answir — " "VVs, if tht' circle be composed of good,
spiritually-minded, prayerful persons — those who
hold God in their life and are seeking lor truth.
Their combined influence will constitute an attractive
force, and supply the conditions v.iereby the good
in the World of Sjiirit may be brought into uplifting
and helpful communication with us. But nc ,
certainly not, if the circle be that of the unspiritual
ones. In assisting in snrh circles, you will be but
helping to open the door to the ones you do not
want, and saying to the tramps and undesirables ot
the Spiritual World — ' Come in and make yourselves
at home." "

And lastly, if you possess, as Jesus and the early
Christians did, the psychic power of " di^rFiiing
spirits " (i Cor. xii. lo v.), and by chance (or rather
let us say by God's ordering) you meet a poor unrest-
ful spirit, whom you invited not, but who has
crossed your path because the chain of the past is
holding him down to the earth-plane — oh ! be like

,*«

PROBLEMS OF THE SPIRITUAL.

the Christ of Love and Pity ; help him by letting him
know that your prayer has gone up— the prayer that
the light of the Holy Spirit of God may break in
upon the darkness of an alienated mind, and that
he may see, as God's beckoners to him, the Harbour-
lights of higher Spheres.

VI. Will the relationships which have existed
between persons in this world he maintained in
the Life Beyond?

That, in our opinion, will absolutely depend upon
whether there existed, as the basis of the earthly rela-
tionship, the principle of Spiritual-attraction, or
Affinity. There can be no union between soul and
soul, in the World of Spirit, apart from this. Dis-
sociated from the Physical and from all the con-
siderations of the Physical, the only bond of con-
nection between spirit and spirit must be spiritual.
Now, many of the relationships connected with the
earth-hfe are not founded on this spiritual basis.
They spring from the Physical, and never rise beyond
it. In this world, persons are often so connected
with one another, that the spirit-self of the indivi-
duals comes but little, or not at all, into the relation-
ship.

Take some of the instances which are presented in

PROBLEMS OF THE SPIRITUAL.

(if :

regard to the Marriage-tie. Two persons, we will
suppose, from a consideration merely of money, or
social position, or expediency, or fleeting fancy,
enter into the relationship of man and wife. The
essential part of them — their spirit, with all its
powers of love and sympathy — may but little,
perhaps not at all, be called into play in the trans-
action. In regard to them, there may be no con-
junction of spirit with spirit, mind with mind, and
heart with heart. The man married the woman
only because he wanted a wife, and she was socially
and physically eligible. The woman married the man
because her position and status in the world would
be advanced thereby.

Such a relationship, we believe, will not be per-
petuated in the Life Beyond. Those two persons,
there, will not stand in the relationship of wedded
beings. Death, which launches us into a World
where spiritual activities are everything, will remove
from them the causes out of which their earthly
relationship arose ; and devoid of the spiritual basis
of union, each will be no more to the other than
any other spirit might be. It was due to the Sad-
ducees* failure to perceive that the only lasting bond
of union must be a spiritual one, that prompted them

PROBLEMS OF THE SPIRITUAL.

to ask our Lord, " In the Anastasis, whose wife shall
she be of the seven ? for they all had her." (Matt,
xxii. 28 V.) Christ's reply 10 them was no declara-
tion that the relationship embodied in marriage, if
based on the spiritual union of two beings, would
not be perpetuated in the World of Spirit. He
did but enunciate the principle, that no earthly
marriage, contracted merely from considerations of
the mundane (in the case in point, to raise up seed
to a deceased brother), could possibly, in the Life
Beyond, constitute the bond between spirit and
spirit. " In the Anastasis," said Jesus, " they are
as the angels of God in heaven," i.e. they are spiritual
beings ; they live in the environment of the Spiritual.
" They neither marry, nor are given in marriage."
The Physical will be superseded ; no merely physical
tie which linked two persons on earth will constitute
their bond of union hereafter. Soul must be wedded
to soul, or the earthly relationship will be broken by
the disrupting hand of Death. Spirit in tune with
spirit is the only basis of relationship Beyond the
Veil.

It may be asked— Will, then, the Marriage-tie
be dissolved at death ? Will those who have been
connected in this life, stand disconnected and

PKOliLEMS OF THE SPIRITUAL.

\ri-

unrelated to each other hereafter ? We think, not ;
if the earthly relationship was the outcome of, or
has led to the development of a spiritual affinity.
The relationship which has maintained mutual love
and sympathy and has caused the spiritual force of
the one being to energize towards the other, will not
cease to exist with dissociation from the Physical.
If that relationship be founded on the spiritual
within us, its continuance is assured ; because our
spirit-self and its energies and powers are not im-
paired by physical dissolution.

The husband and wife, whose souls have been in
tune in the earth-life, will not. we believe, be un-
related in the Life to come. The spiritual inter-
action set up will not stop at the incident of Death.
Conjoined on earth, by an indestructible principle,
they will gravitate to each other in the World of
Spirit. The Physical and the considerations of the
Physical will have disappeared, but the spiritual
union will remain intact. In that Life the relation-
ship created in the earth-life will become intensified
and consummrted. Those spiritually united souls
will still be the nearest and dearest to each other.
Like the Master, Who loved all, but specially loved
St. John and the family at Bethany, each of those

f», I.

PROBLEMS OF THE SPIRITUAL.

two spiritually-married souls will be more closely
allied to the other, than either can be to any other
spirit. In the light of such a thought, how significant
and beautiful becomes the earthly relationship of
Marriage to mutually loving ones ! " Till death us
do pari," says the Prayer-Book. Nay— " Till our
death enhance and spiritually consummate the
bond for ever."

Take the case of a man or a woman who may
have been twice or thrice married. Will all those
persons who were the earthly partners of one having
had such an experience, stand in the relationship of
husbands, or wives, to that one, in the Hereafter ?
We think, not; for the reason that it is only the
highest degree of spiritual affinity that can con-
stitute spiritual maniage, and that, we believe, can
only exist between a soul and one other soul.

The reason, we take it, why Christianity, as God's
higher revealment of truth, discountenances Poly-
gamy, is that earthly Marriage was intended to pre-
figure spiritual Marriage. A developed soul will
love and must love other souls ; aye, all souls ; but
there can be but one soul between whom and itself
the closest affinity and sympathy can exist. The
man and woman who have stood to each other in the

.' -fe"

)!; I

PROBLEMS OF THE SPIRITUAL.

earthly relationship of husband and wife, will, if there
has been a real soul-union, stand in that same relation*
ship in Spirit-hfe. Those whom God hath thus spiri-
tually joined together will not be put asunder because
the physical conditions of their union are removed.
But it will not be so, apart from this union of soul.
Without this intermingling of spirit with spirit, this
spiritual attracting force exerted by the one on the
other, these two persons may stand altogether un-
related in the Life Beyond. The contact there may
be no more than the contact which each may have
with souls not known during earth-life. In a World
of spiritual reality, the wedded couple of earth,
unlinked in spirit, may find themselves in divergent
spheres of life and interest.

Apply this to the case of the one who may have
had several wedded partners. In the World of
Spirit, whose wife will the woman be who on earth
had two or three husbands ? Whose husband will
the man be who had two or three wives ? The ques-
tion affects a large section of mankind — the poly-
gamist, and the man who has married more than
once. " They neither marry, nor are given in mar-
riage," said the Christ. The earthly sense of mar-
riage will have been obliterated ; the Physical ccn-

PROBLEMS OF THE SPIRITUAL.

comitants of union between being and being will have
disappeared ; but the connection of soul with soul
V ill remain. Every spirit, we believe, will be short
of full development, and will not have fulfilled the
design of its being, until it has found, and has been
united to, that one other spirit ; its spiritual mate,
its comi.iement, its alter ego. And they twain become
one.

Did there exist between the man and one of the
women to whom he was wedded on earth that
spiritual affinity, that mutual attraction of ego to
ego, that union of essential being ? If so, the rela-
tionship will not be dissolved by death. In the
Beyond, they will be spiritually-wedded souls. The
bond between them, although in the past associated
with the Physical, was not dependent upon it. It
had its roots in the Spiritual and it must remain.
The spirit-man may still love those other souls who
in earth-life had stood in the relationship of wife to
him, but his love for them will be different from the
love he will hole? for the one between whom and
himself there subsisted this soul-"nion. The latter
will be his spirit-partner. The earthly marriages,
unbased on any union of souls, will have been
annulled by Death ; while the relationship which

I '

PROBLEMS OF THE SPIRITUAL.

if' ;

was rooted in the spiritual will be continued. That
soul-linked husband and wife of earth, will be the
spiritual husband and wife of the Beyond.

And what has been stated above in regard to the
relationship of Marriage, appears to us to apply to
all other earthly relationships. It may be asked—
Will a father and mother, when they have passed
into Spirit-Life, stand in that relationship to the
ones who in earth-life were their children ? Will
the relationship of brother and sister and other
family-connections be maintained hereafter ? Will
not all ties of consanguinity disappear in an en-
vironment in which everything pertains to the
Spiritual, and nothing to the Physical ? We reply,
It will depend upon whether the earthly relation-
ship did, or did not, bring about soul-relationship
and affinity.

The mother, for instance, whose soul goes out to
the undeveloped soul of the little child who is sub-
sequently snatched from her by Death, will certainly,
we think, stand in relationship as mother to that
child m Spirit-life. But, it may be urged, there
could be, in such a case, no affinity between the soul
of the mother and the soul of the child. The child
died with its soul undeveloped ; there could be no

PROBLEMS OF THE SPIRITUAL.

response on the part of the child's soul to the soul
of the mother. Quite so, for a while at least. But
the soul-vibrations of love from the mother on earth
can reach and affect the developing soul of the child
Behind the Veil. Those vibrations, projected into
an atmosphere pulsating with Love, will produce
Love. The spirit-child will feel that love. Its soul
will respond to it. As it spiritually advances there
will be inbome upon its consciousness the fact that
the soul-force of an unknown mother is enwrapping
it. A longing for that mother will arise ; an ex-
pectation of union with her ; a praying that this may
be gratified. We can picture the rest — can we not ?
A ministering-spirit leading a child-spirit towards
a newly-emancipated woman-spirit. No word of ex-
planation, no introduction ! A look, a thrill, on the
part of woman and child. Their souls have recog-
nized each other. The relationship of earth has not
been broken : the mother and child are re-united as
such.

The other earthly ties of relationship, also, which
make a person a brother, a sister, a lover, a friend,
will not, we think, be obliterated in the Higher Life.
If between that one and the other to whom he or she
stands related there txists the touch of soul with

PROBLEMS OF THE SPIRITUAL.

; i

soul, the tic will be maintained. The earthly rela-
tionships, which in Time have ennobled and sane
tified human lives and drawn spirit to spirit, are
destined to play an important part in the experiences
of Eternity. In the World of Spirit, the maintained
and spiritually ac .ntuated ties which knit husband
and wife, lover and lover, parent and child and
friend and friend, will be found to be the Divinely
appointed means by which the mighty principle of
Love will the better energize in the human soul,
attuning it for its highest and closest communion
with the Father of Love.

It may seem a daring statement to make, but we
believe that many a husband and father, many a wile
and mother, whose relationship with partner or
children has drawn forth and combined the forces
and sweetness of souls, will hereafter stand higher
in the attainments o.^ Love and better adapted for
God's Heaven, than many a canonized saint who
in cell or cloister has divorced himself from the
relationships of life. Love in a human soul will
develop into 5^//-love, apart from the reciprocal
touch r .her souls. And the relationships of earth,
we h ve, which effect this reciprocal touch, are'
Divinely appointed to remt. Will there, then, be

'■' u

PROBLEMS OF THE SriKIIUAL.

some in the Aftor-I.ifo whose earthly relationships
with others may cease to exist ? Yes, alas ! we think
so. There are, for example, un fatherly fathers and
unmothcrly mothers, in regard to whom the only tic
subsisting between them and their child ^^n is a
physical one. They begat them : nothing more.
No spiritual bond links them and their offspring.
Death, we think, will snap, once and for ever, that
mere'y jjhysical connection. There will remain
nothing, in the Beyond, which can constitute a
linking of the spirit-self of the parent and the spirit-
self of the child.

The work of the Church of England Waifs and
Strays Society and Dr. Barnardo's Homes reveals the
fact that there are such fathers and mothers.

Now, whatever may be the jwssibilities of repent-
ance, amendment and development hereafter, in the
case of such parents, they will not evade the in-
violable law of God, that " whatsoever a man soweth,
that shall he also reap " (Gal. vi. 7 v.).

Earthly parents who have never realized, nor
sought to cultivate the spiritual bond between them
and their children will reap the consequences. In
the Spirit-World they will be short of an experience
and a joy which they might have had. An earthly

■

PROBLEMS OF THE SPIRITUAL.

relationship might have blossomed into a heavenly
relationship. But it did not do so. Hereafter, the
thrill and delight of spiritualized fatherhood and
motherhood will be an impossibility to them. The
mercy of God may cause them to develop, at length,
into blessed souls ; but for eternity they may be short
of what they might ' ave been, had the earthly rela-
tionship been sanctified for the development of the
spirit. They may experience an " everlasting dam.
nation," which neans an everlasting loss. For ever,
they may be spiritually less developed than they
might have been : a department of their being may
remain unopened. They may see the spirit-chUdren
of others clasped in the arms of their spirit-parents ;
but no spirit-child is held in their embrace. The'
son or daughter, born to them on earth, may meet
them and be known to them ; but that one may be
no more to them than any other stranger-spirit.
The sense of relationship, unbased upon the spiritual,
will have gone.

On the othar hand, a beautiful and comforting
thought suggests itself. It is this; that many a
soul, in the Life Beyond, h.ay not, until then, realize
the fuU possibilities of higher being, in finding the
satisfaction of the yearnings of the spiritual naiuit.

I'KOBLEMS UF THE SI'IKITL'AL.

and the answer to the intuitions and aspirations of
love. There arc persons, capable of so loving another,
that an earthly marriage-relationship could only be
to them the starting-point of an indissoluble spiritual
union in Life hereafter.

But how many persons arc there who never meet,
in this world, the one between whom and themselves
there is this touch of soul with soul. If, by chance,
they met that one, there may have been all sorts of
worldly considerations why their lives did not be-
come conjoined. What of them ? What ol the
gentle, loving, Christ-like woman who longed for,
but r'-^'er knew, a true man's love ? What of the
good man, a department of whose soul remained un-
developed, because no woman-soul had loved him
above all others ? Will such persons never know
the joy of loving one particular soul and of being loved
by that soul, in a way which transcends all other
possibilities of love ? In the World Beyond, will
no true spiritual mate complete the being of such
a man or woman > We believe that such ijersons,
capable of so spiritually loving, although denied
in this world the fulfilment of their spirit's longings,
will meet in the Hereafter their kindred spirit.
Somewhere, in the great Universe of Spirit, there is,

PROBLEMS OF THE SPIRITUAL.

we think, the alier ego, the complcmental soul, for
each loving, though mateless, one of earth. Only
will the purpose of God have been fulfilled, we
believe, when '• they twain shall have become one " ;
when those alter egos, drawn to each other by the
irresistible force of spiritual attraction, shall have
met, and combined in the highest relationship of
spiritually-wedded souls.

Again, there are many women who, while possess-
ing all the capacities for true motherhood, have
never become mothers. A keen disappointment is
felt by them ; a craving of their spirit has not been
answered ; great resources of their nature have not
been drawn upon ; no being has stood to them in
the relationship of child.

In the Life of Spirit will there be no possibility
of satisfying the spiritual instincts and aspirations
of suc-^ persons ? Will the thrill and joy which
arises from the fact of being viewed as tnother, by
one or more, be never granted to the potentially
maternal souls who have passed out of earth-life
childless ?

We hold the conviction that in the accomplish-
ment of the All-Father's purpose of Love, the
satisfying o^ this true spiritual instinct wUi be vouch-

PROBLEMS OF THE SPIRITUAL.

safed to such. There are millions of little child-
souls who pass into Spirit-life, unfoUowed by the
love and prayers of any earthly mother. What if
those little ones should be assigned to the care and
become the spiritual children of those women-souls
who have never on earth, in spite of their longing,
been a mother to any ! Can we suppose that a
Divine instinct, implanted in every true woman-
spirit, though ungratificd as far as Ihis life is con-
cerned, is destined to lead to nothing — to die out from
lack of opportunity to express itself ?

Nay ; we have different ideas of God's Love and
purposes. He never mocks His creatures by en-
dowing them with noble instincts and longings for
which no satisfyings have been provided. No woman
possessing the spiritual capability of motherhood,
will, we think, ever reach the possibilities of her
being, until some child-spirit regards her as spiritual
mother. May it not be that, in this way, untold
numbers of God's little ones, unblessed by a true
mother's love while in earth-life, may in Spirit-
life be encircled by the arms of these Spirit-
mothers, and in the enfoldments of their love may
move on to the development and perfecting of
being ?

V ■

PROBLEMS OF THE SPIRITUAL.

Such ideas may not be compatible with the
notions which have prevailed as to the Life Beyond ;
but they are compatible with our growing ideas and
extended knowledge of the Love and Purpose of our
Father-God.

. ',

VII, Why do not all the Departed mamfcsl them-
selves to those whom they have left behind ?

We can conceive of there being several rea.sons
why they do not do so.

I. Many who have passed into Spirit-hfe have no
desir* to renew any intercourse with the world from
which they have passed ; and apart from the question
of a ministry to us, entrusted, we beheve, to many of
the Departed, the fact of having, or not having, a
desire to re-estabhsh earthly relationships will
largely determine whether they do or do not re-
establish the same.

Now, in the case of many who depart this life, the
world they have left behind exerts an enormous
attracting power upon them. Spiritually undeve-
loped and unattuned for their new environment
their tastes and desires gravitate earthward. This
class experience a desire to renew, if possible, their
intercourse with the mundane. But there are a

it'

I'!?;

PROBLEMS OF THE SPIRITUAL.

great number who pass hence, in regard to whom the
world exerts no sufficiently attracting force to draw
them back to it. Death has launched them into a
new life, and they are devoid of any longing for the
persons and things connected with the old. They
resemble those in this world who are able to sever
themselves from past associations, to betake them-
selves to another country and other surroundings,
and never afterwards to feel any desire for that which
has been left behind.

This, we think, is so with regard to many of the
Departed whose earthly lot was one of predominating
suffering, or difficulty, or disappointment. It is so,
we think, in the case of those whose " sunshine of
life " went with the dear ones taken from ihem by
Death. To them the new Hfe with its reliefs and
possibilities and its re-unions with those " loved long
since, and lost awhile," causes all their interest in
the old life to recede into the background of their
consciousness, and at length to wholly fade away.
If such as these come back at all, it is not from a
desire to re-connect themselves with a world with
which they have done, but to discharge some mission
of good entrusted to them.

Again, there are others of the Departed who have

PROBLEMS OF THE SPIRITUAL. 99

no desire for renewed intercourse with this world,
for the reason that they have never cultivated the'
quaUties of love and sympathy. The greatest of all
attracting forces in the universe is Love. It is the
mighty power which, according to our Lord, will
ultimately bring about the accomplishment of God's
Purpose to save the world. " I, if I be lifted up
(if I make this supreme sacrifice of Myself for the
sake of Love) will draw all unto Me " (John xii. 32).
Love is that principle which can attract spirit-beings
i the surroundings of the Physical, who feel none of
the attracting forces of evil. It drew the exalted
Spirit-Christ from the highest spheres of life and
experience to the circumscription of earthly existence.
It has drawn angels to this world, and it can draw
spirit-men and women as God's instruments for
blessing and helping us.

Now, the Departed ones, b-tween whom and
others in the earth-life the- exists no bond of love
and sympathy, will feel naught of that higher im-
pulse of the soul which expresses itself in a longing
for those who have been left behind. The attracting
power of Love, of spiritual affinity, will be wanting.
There are many who answer to this ; many men
and women who go out of this world unloving and

I f1

100

PROBLEMS OF THE SPIRITUAL.

unloved ; who are not bad enough (as in the case of
debased ones) to be brought again into contact with
the Physical by the irresistible attraction of evil ;
but are not spiritually developed enough to ex-
perience any drawings of Love.

II. Another reason why all departed ones do not
manifest themselves, is to be found, we think, in the
fact that the manifestation of which the Questior ^r
is thinking, involves the reconnection of spirit-beings
with the Physical world. This, we conceive, may
in many instances be incompatible with growth and
advancement in spirit-life. The conditions under
which a spirit is able to manifest himself— using
the term to convey the idea which is generally meant,
viz., that a spirit should make himself visible, or
express himself through the mediumship of the
mind and bodily organs of another— implies associa-
tion with the Physical. This is so with regard to
materializations, trance-utterances and automatic
writings. The communicating spirit in such cases
of manifestation brings himself into close association
with the surroundings of the Physical; and these
surroundings are lower in degree than those of his
new life and environment. This close association
with the lower— especially if it be a maintained one,

PROBLEMS OF THE SPIRITUAL

101

may constitute a very real obstacle to the discarnate
one adjusting himself to the higher spiritual ex-
periences. His advance may be retarded thereby.
By maintaining his association with th'? Physical
world, it may be harder for him to become en rapport
with the Spiritual. God may see it to be as un-
desirable and harmful to him to re-establish a contact
with the Physical, as a Principal of a College might
deem it undesirable for a student, designated for
high culture, to associate with the unlearned and
unrefined. We believe that this is one of other
reasons why those who pass out of earth-life with
some attunement for spiritual development, are not
very often permitted to manifest themselves through
those channels of communication which involve a
re-contact with that which is connected with the
Physical— such manifestations, for example, as are
obtained at Stances. The spirits who are able,
through the instrumentality of the Physical, to
materialize, are not, as a rule, advanced or spiritually
developed ones. TI. y are, certainly, not beings on
the higher, or highest, planes of spiritual life and
experience. Such communicators, so dependent on
conditions pertaining to the Physical— whose efforts
are rather to manifest themselves objectively than

1 ^';

r' -

102

PROBLEMS OF THE SPIRITUAL.

subjectively — are feeble and disappointing in their
utterances, as compared with those spiritual com-
municators who speak to many on the higher plane
of mind and spirit. The trance-utterances and the
inspirational writings exhibit the control of a higher
order than any which is presented in a materializing
circle.

Then again, this view of the matter is supported
by the fact that, although at the outset of spirit-
life many of the Departed find it possible to renew
their association with the Physical, it afterwards
becomes increasingly difficult for them to do so.
Their advance in the Other World makes it so ;
and at length there comes a time when such inter-
course is made impossible. Advance in the Spiritual,
places them altogether out of reach of the Physical.
Communication in that case between them and those
in earth-life can only then be on the plane of the
Psychic and the Mental.

Nor is this a mere conjecture. There are many
instances which go to show that as a spirit advances
to higher experiences in the Spiritual World, it be-
comes more and more difficult to adjust himself to
Physical conditions which are necessary, in order that
he may objectively manifest himself to those on earth.

PROBLEMS OF THE SPIRITUAL.

103

I have personal friends who have seen once, — in
some cases twice— and no more, those who have
appeared to them after death. One gentleman,
known to me, had seen and spoken to his departed
wife on many occasions, both by night and day,
during a period extending over a year. He was an
unimaginative, practical man, a lawyer, and he pre-
faced his statement to me by saying—" I am going
to tell you something which is a solemn fact ; but
which I hardly expect you will believe ; although
you are a parson, and teach people that there is a
Life Beyond." He assured me that he had seen his
wife after her death on many occasions. That at one
of the appearances to him she had earnestly begged
him to withdraw from a certain commercial enterprise
upon which he had made up his mind to embark
because it would mean financial ruin to him. He
was so impressed by what she said that he acted on
her advice, and saved himself from that which, as
was shown afterwards, would have been disastrous.

After a while, the visits of this Spirit-wife became
less frequent, and at length the reason was explained.
On the last occasion she appeared to her husband
{he has rejoined her now), she told him that she felt
that that manifestation would be her last to him in

Iu4

PROBLEMS OF TIIF SI'IKIlUAf..

tliis world. She said that on entering into Spirit-
life her love for him, and his psychic condition had
made it comparatively easy for her to objectively
manifest herself to him. But as time went on, and
her attuncment with the World of Spirit had grown,
she had found it becoming more and more difficult to
retain her relationship with the Physical. She felt
that no longer would she have the power of ob-
jectively manifesting herself to him. But still she
would b? constantly near him ; in closer communion
with him than she had ever hitherto been. Her
inability to any longer approach him through the
mediumship of the Physical would only mean a still
closer and more real approach. Henceforth, the
communication between him and her would be on a
higher level. Obedient to the demands of Love,
her rising and develojiing mind and spirit would
constantly touch and help and bless his mind and
spirit. Her prayers for him and his prayers for her
were to strengthen and perfect the bond between
them. The union of mutually loving souls could
never be dissolved, because God is Love. In this
world, he would, probably, never see her again ; but
on the Border-line and Beyond, where the limitations
of the Physical arc for ever cast aside, she would

PROBLEMS OF THE SPIRITUAL.

105

meet him, greet him, love him as she loved him now,
and would be his pioneer to higher life.

From that day, until he himself passed Boyond the
Veil, this friend constantly felt the presence of his
departed wife, but never again saw her.

From what has been said, it will be seen that
another reason can be assigned for the fact that not
all the Departed are permitted to visibly manifest
themselves to us.

But it must not be supposed that this inability of
dear departed ones to do this, is to be interpreted as
meaning that they are unable to approach us and
unable to come into vital touch with us. The con-
trary is the truth. Their ascension to higher life
and experience renders them capable of establishing
a communication on a higher i^'ane of being — on the
plane of mind and spirit.

Many communicators from the Other Side, denied
the power of visibly manifesting themselves to us
here, because their advancement will best be served
by the denial, can come hi to a communication with
us closer than that which any materializing spirit
can effect. The concomitants of the Physical may
play no part in the contact ; but the mind and
spirit of the discirnatc one and tlie mind and spirit

106 PROBLEMS OF THE SPIRITUAL.

of the earth one may come into conjunction. The
being on the carth-plane may receive all sorts of
uplifting and helpful influences from the being on
the spirit-plane. The sudden feeling of restfulness
which comes to a poo. distressed and perturbed
one ; the unexpected ray of something akin to the
light of Hope -vhich darts across the darkness of a
saddened heart ; the new impulse which challenges
our right to surrender ourselves to despair and ment.il
misery, and bids us to try to be brave and patient
and unrebellious ; the cause that leads us to make
the earnest determination to trust God, to pray to
Him amid the darkness of our grief and bereavement ;
yes, and that thrill of relief which comes from the'
thought of re-union-all this, we believe, may be the
result of an impact of a spirit-mind, energizing under
higher conditions, upon the mind of a dweller upon
the earth.

" Nonsense ; a slight to the Holy Spirit of God ! "
say some who know little about Spiritual realities.
" Not so," say we, " the blessing and uplifting is
all from God. If discarnate spirits lift us Godward
and heavenward, the power of the Holy Ghost is
behind that uplifting. God is only dealing with us,
as He always deals with men : He blesses us through

PROBLEMS OF THE SPIRITUAL.

107

our fellows. Why consider it a disparagemrnt of tho
power and work of the Holy Ghost, that 1 do|>artcd
one should be God's instrument in te hing and
blessing us, when no Christian would dream of enter-
taining such an idea in regard to an angel, or an
earthly preacher or teacher of God and righteousness ?

Do let us be logical. God's principle of blessing
man through man obtains in the World of Spirit
as it docs here.

III. There is another reason why not all of the
Departed manifest themselves to us. It lies in the
fact that many of us are so psychically undeveloped
as to render it impossible for them to do so. Love
may attract them to us ; they may have an intense
longing to be with us ; there may be, moreover, an
earnest desire to help us, and yet they may be wholly
unable to set up a communication of which we may
be sensil)le. Why is this ? The cause may be with
us. We may be so mentally and psychically con-
stituted as to lack that which is a necessary condi-
tion of manifestation. Our spiritual self may not
be sufficiently attuned to receive the impressions of
the Spiritual. In regard to individuals it may be
the same as it is in regard to Wireless-Telegraphy —
not all instruments can register the impulse which

■it *

i-i

io8

PROB^.EMS OF THE SPIRITUAL.

I -

is projected, ' u^ o;ily an attuned one. There
arc thousands c' o.>-c. •: who have no experience
whatever of any impact of the Spiritual, simply
because they possess as yet no power of register-
ing it.

May there not have been a significance in our Lord
selecting only three of the Apostolic men, to be the
witnesses of the manifestation of departed Moses on
the Mountain of Transfiguration ? May not St.
Peter, St. James and St. John, alone of the Twelve,
have possessed the psychic powers, which made the
revelation possible to them, while not possible to
the others ? Thus, there are many who bemoan
the fact, that their dear departed ones never make
their presence manifestable to them. Part of that
regret and sadness would disappear, if it could but be
realized that, although unseen and unfelt by us our
loved ones on the Other Side are often with us; that
when the sight of the empty chair in the darkened
home recalls the painful longing for the sight of a
vanished face, and reopens the fountain of our
grief—

" Then the forms of the departed
Enter at the open door ;
The Ijclovtd, the truc-liearted
Come to visit me once more.

,1-

PROBLEMS OF THE SPIRITUAL.

109

With a slow and noiseless footstep

Comes that messenger divine,
Takes the vacant chair l)eside me,

Lays her gentle hand in «r,iUu."

IV. There is another reasor I think, why not all
of the Departed manifest thei.' ;c! -e?^. to us. Their
knowledge of the fact that many have an unreasoning
fear of the Spiritual restrains them. With some, the
contact with a spiritual being, even with one who
had loved and been beloved by them, calls for naught
but a feeling of abject terror. Our spirit dear ones
know this, and it stays them from manifesting them-
selves.

I remember once trying to comfort a poor be-
reaved one who had said that she could bear her
sorrow bravely, if only she could know that her
departed husband was alivo and still loved her— by
saying, " Perhaps, it may be permitted to him to
appear to you (as others have done) and assure you
of this." "Oh! goodness, gracious! I hope not.
It would terrify me out of my life were he to come
to me," was the reply of the lady. " Then I do
not think you wiU see him, until you yourself cross
the Border-line. He loves you too much to terrify
you," was my rejoiuJer.

r:^

PROBLEMS OF THE SPIRITUAL.

There are many of the Departed, we believe, who
do not manifest themselves to those whom they
have left on earth for this very reason. Love
draws them to them ; love makes them want to
communicate with them ; the condi.Mons are favour-
able-the visitants and visited are in psychic affinity •
and yet an obstacle is interposed ; the dread of the'
Beyond is present.

This intense fear of all that pertains to the Spiritual
World IS very inexpHcable ; at all events on the part
of those who believe in the Christian Religion. To
profess a faith in continued life after death ; to regard
that hfe as being an advance on this present life
and then to be stricken with abject fear at encoun'
tenng one who has passed into that life, seems to
us to savour of inconsistency. But so it is with
many. An old clergyman-friend of mine once said
to me-" If I belie ed as you do about the Spirit-
World, I should be frightened to go to bed."

Not so, our knowledge of the Other World removes
this unreasoning fear, and clears away a barrier
which at present stands between us and many in that
World.

.*?

, t

Ill

VIII. Will the fad that beings in Spint-lifc ate on
different planes of life and experience, be an obstacle to
re -union hereafter ?

This is a question which has exercised the mind
of very many earnest thinkers, and one which has
again and again been submitted by correspondents.
It is a question which does not, of course, present
itself to those Christians who accept the old " ortho-
dox " view, that for belif a moral and spiritual
transformation is wrought )eath, and that for

non-believers no salvation after death is to be
expected.

Those persons, as far as they are consistent with
their creed, entertain no hope of the re-union of
themselves and those who have ^ied as unbelievers.
The theology they endorse teaches that a great gulf
yawns between the saved and the unsaved, which
will never be bridged. Re-union, in that case, is out

112

PROBLEMS OF THE SPIRITUAL.

of the question. Fortunately, the greater number
who profess to accept this old notion, save themselves
fvom the mad-house, either by not allowing them-
selves to think about it, or by secretly hoping it
may not hi true. To such straits does a narrow
theology reduce them. Those persons also, who
believe in the power of Death to morally and
spiritually transform, see no difficulty in regard to the
re-union of souls. They suppose that all who depart
this life in the Christian faith, whatever may be the
point of development reached by them, are at death
ushered into a condition of instantly-acquired ex-
cellence. Seizing the words of St. Paul and applying
them indiscriminately to all believers, they imagine
that every Christian, developed or undeveloped, will
leave this world to be at once with Christ. Such an
idea, of course, implies for all Christians on the Other
Side, not different planes, but a uniform plane, of
life and experience. If it be true that at dying
all believers go immediately to be with the Saviour,
then all such arc in one sphere and on one plane of
experience, and re-union becomes a foregone con-
clusion.

But our advance in the knowledge of spiritual
matters has caused many to perceive that both these

PROBLEMS OF THE SPIRITUAL.

113

ideas referred to are un -scriptural and wrong. The
great principle under which God is seen in every-
thing to be working in the raising of beings and
things from the lower to the higher, is that which
shows that development and perfection is never
reached but by slow and gradual means.

" First the blade, then the ear, after that the full
corn in the ear," said Jesus ; and He was proclaiming
the law which obtains no less in the Spiritual than in
the Physical. Our recognition of this universal
principle of being, our better understanding of the
statements of the Bible, and our knowledge of the
fact that very few depart this life in a moral and
spiritual condition such as to equip them for adjust-
ment to highest spiritual life— all this impels one to
the conclusion that there are, and must be, in the
Life Beyond different planes of experience; and
that the sphere into which a soul will pass at death
will be determined by the degree of development
reached at that time. Like Judas, every one will
" go to his own place."

The one who has by faith connected himself with
Christ, but in whom as yet the Christ-graces have
not blossomed, will not, at dying, secure an entrance
into that Christ-sphere of spirit-life, into which the

114

PROBLEMS OF THE SPIRITUAL.

Apostle so confidently expected to be admitted on
leaving this world. The connection of that un-
developed one with the Saviour will have placed him
in a " state of salvation," and will have disposed him
aright for ascension to sphere after sphere of higher
attainment ; but no more. The higher and the
highest spheres of Spiritual life will not be reached
until he shall have become spiritually adjusted to
them. The spheres of the Other World are condi-
tions rather than localities ; they are constituted by
what we are rather than by where we may he, " The
Kingdom of Heaven is within you," said Jesus.

The narrow-minded, selfish, bad-tempered, ill-
mannered and unloving Christians will not, as soon
as they go hence, find themselves in the same sphere
as that of the Christ and St. Paul. Many a selfish
one, who has reckoned on his " orthodoxy " to insure
him against judgment hereafter, may find himself
after death in experiences akin to those of Dives.

Now, it is the realization of all this which has
caused the Questioner to ask — Will not these different
planes of life and experience present an obstacle to
re-union ? We think not ; and proceed to give our
reasons for holding that view.

First. If the spheres or planes of the Other World

rl':-f

PROBLEMS OF THE SPIRITUAL.

be, as we have stated, conditions rather than localities,
there can be no difficulty in believing that the
Departed in different spheres come into relationship
with one another. To believe otherwise would be to
commit ourselves to a thought which is unreason-
able, and at variance with what we know. There
is intercourse between the spheres in regard to this
world. Men and women on earth are on all sorts of
different planes of life and thought. That fact
constitutes no barrier to their coming into contact.
In like manner the spiritual condition of some of the
Departed is wholly dissimilar from that of others;
but this dissimilarity is no obstacle to their asso-
ciation.

We have a notable corroboration of this assertion,
in what is recorded in the Ne\. Testament concerning
the experiences of our Lord after death.

When Jesus, in company with the repentant robber,
passed into the Spiritual World, His spiritual con-
dition, or sphere, as the Being perfected in moral
grace, must have been vastly different from the
spiritual condition of the man who had but a moment
or two before set his soul in the direction of good-
ness. On that Good Frday evening, they were not
on the same plane of life and experience. Yet as

ii6

PROBLEMS OF THE SPIKIIUAL

far as the contact of person with person is concerned,
there was re-union. They were together. Christ's
own words declare it — " To-day, shalt thou be with
Me in Paradise." Again, on the testimony of St.
Peter, our Lord, after death, went into the Spirit-
World to preach the Gospel to spirits who in earth-
life had been disobedient, in order that they might
" live according to God in the spirit." (See i Peter
iii. 18-20 and iv. 6.) The Preacher was on a far
higher plane of spiritual life and experience than
that of the ones to whom He preached ; but that was
no obstacle to His association with them.

In the parable of the Rich man and Lazarus,
Christ represents the two men as being in wholly
dissimilar spheres of experience in the Spirit-World;
the one was in " Abraham's bosom " — in a condition
of restfulness ; the other, in " Hades " — in a con-
dition of painful discipline. As yet, until God's
knife of discipline had pruned away the overgrowth
of selfishness frojn the character of the rich man,
there was " a great gulf fixed " between him and
Lazarus ; and Dives was incapable of participating
in the higher spiritual experiences enjoyed by Lazarus.
But this difference in the spheres of these excamate
ones did not prevent them from coming into contacc.

PROBLEMS OF THE SPIRITUAL.

117

There was inter-communication between the spheres :
the one on the lower plane, saw and spoke to those
on the higher plane. So, we believe it to be, in the
case of the Departed. We, when we pass into
Spirit-life, may be on a plane of life and experience,
higher or lower than the plane of those who have
preceded us, and whom ve have known and loved
in the earth-life. Will this dissimilarity in regaid
to planes, render it impossible or improbable thit
we shall come into communication with them ?
We think not. We believe that, in the Spirit- World,
the fact of being on different planes of life may, and
does, cause some spirits who had been known to
each other in this world, to be di-;sociated, for a while
at least, in the Other World. But we do not think
this to be so in the case of those between whom
there had previously existed a bond of love or sym-
pathy. Those whom we have loved on this earth,
and who, perhaps, long agu, have gone into Spirit-
life, will have advanced to spheres of experience, to
which we shall not immediately attain on leaving this
world. But that will not involve dissociation from
them until such time as we ourselves shall have
scaled the moral and spiritual heights at which they
stand. Love will draw those on the higher alti-

■■

ii8

PROBLEMS OF THE SPIRITUAL.

i in

tudes of being to us on the lower ; as it drew Jesus
and the angels from spheres of glory to the earth
plane. Those beloved and progressed departed ones
will come to us when we " pass over " ; they will be
with us at times ; the old intercourse will be renewed ;
and as we move on towards attunement to their
higher experiences, the bond between them and us
will be strengthened and perfected.

Thus we think that while, of course, in the case of
spirit and soirit, a perfect union— an accord of mind
and heart, a mutual participation in the higher
experiences of Spirit-life— can only exist when both
shall have become adjusted to exalted environment ;
yet, in the meanwhile, ther'^ i . <^ very real contact
and association between those who may stand in the
Other World at different points of spiritual develop-
ment. Surely, it must have been to teach us this,
among other truths, that the New Testament
writers told us about the excamate Saviour in com-
pany with an excamate robber and old-woild sinners
who had repented after death !

Secondly. We can assign another and very
cogent reason for our belief in the re-union of the
Departed, in spite of their being on different planes
of life and experience. It is this ; that God's

PROBLEMS OF THE SPIRITUAL.

119

method of blessing men is that of doing so through
the mediumship of otkers ; and that the principle under
which He acts in this instrumental bestowal of
blessing is, that " the less is blessed of the better."
This method of Divine blessing is followed both in
this world and in the greater World of Spirit.

God blesses us through the instrumentality of
others. That is so in regard to all earthly experience
— is it not ? Every blessing, whether physical,
mental or spiritual, received from God by us here,
is conveyed instrumentally ; others are made His
channels of communication. Has He blessed us
physically ? Do we possess a body, a house, clothes,
food and a thousand other terrestrial things ? Not
one of them has come to us apart from the inter-
position of others.

Has He blessed us mentally ? Are we persons
of e. ded knowledge as to the things which lie
above us, around us and within us ? Very little of
that knowledge did we acquire, except through the
instrumentality of others. Our fellows were God's
agents in teaching us what we know ; our lesser
minds were blessed of the better minds. Has God
blessed us spiritually, so that we have learned some
of those great truths which centre themselves in Him,

ill

120 PROBLEMS OF THE SPIRITUAL

and have become thereby men or women of prayer
and holy aspiration ?

Here, again, the blessing came to us through others.
Fathers, mothers, friends, teachers, preachers, and
writers— the ones better than ourselves in spiritual
culture— were the connecting-wires between God
and us. through which the Divine Sparks of grace
passed to touch us, and turn our undeveloped spirit
Godward. Consider, further, this method of God
in the case of spiritual beings who have been used by
Him as the instruments of blessing the dwellers upon
earth. The Bible abounds in the accounts of angel-
messengers sent to men. Patriarchs and rulers
received their guidance as the leaders of great reli-
gious, social and national movements through the
mediumship of them. Prophets and seers were
inspired ; men and women were helped and com-
forted ; and even the Christ Himself in His hours of
trial was ministered unto and supported through
their agency. In all this, the method of God was
the same ; His blessing was bestowed through the
instrumentality of others ; and beings on the highest
planes conveyed it to those on the earth-plane.

Again, the more enlightened views concerning
God and His purposes in regard to mankind, which

PROBLEMS OF THE SPIRITUAL.

121

are held in this present age, arc due, we believe, to
the fact that a great wave of mental and spiritual
influence is passing to us from the Other Side. The
door between the two Worlds has of late years been
more widely opened. Departed ones, in the fulfil-
ment of the possibihty included in the " Com-
munion of saints," have from their spheres of higher
spiritual attainment touched us in the domain of
mind and spirit. Materialistic Science has received
its death-blow ; the phenomena of human existence
is becoming inexplicable, except on the acknow-
ledgment of the Spiritual ; a new continent of life
and possibility beyond the Physical is being opened
up to us ; and the Gospel of Jesus is becoming re-
invested with the glory which the religious mis-
representations of past ages has bedimmed. And
if this be so ; if all this -xdvance to clearer light on
Divine truth, be the result of the impact of higher
minds Behind the Veil upon our minds, what is it
but another illustration of that great law of God —
that man is blessed through others, and that " the
less is blessed of the better " ! Our argument will
be complete when we think of this principle of
blessing instrumentally and of blessing the lesser
through the higher, in its application to beings in that

k M

122 PROBLEMS OF THE SPIRITUAL.

great domain of life and experience— the Spiritual
World. We believe the principle obtains with
respect to the Departed.

Our advancement in the knowledge of higher
truth has remodelled men's ideas concerning the
Spiritual World. We no longer think of it as peopled
with beings who are all similarly fashioned, mentally
and spiritually, and all similarly circumstanced. We
know it to be a World of infinite variety, of many
spheres of life and experience. Our Saviour Christ
taught us this. He said, " In my Father's House
are many tartying.piaces " O*ov«i xoXX«.')-inany
different spheres of life, in which spirits must remain
awhUe, untU they become attuned for the planes of
high& existence.

Our luller knowledge of truth has taught us, more-
over, more concerning the purpose of God in regard
to all His creatures. It is to bless, and not to curse ;
to save, and not to damn. The " Father's House "'
Beyond the Veil is no less the domain of salvation
and blessing than is this earth. The method He
adopts to raise and bless men there, is the same as
that by which He raises and blesses us here ; viz.,
our fellows are His instruments, and " the less is
blessed of the better."

PROBLEMS OF THE SPIRITUAL.

123

Thus, there is presented to us the strongest of all
reasons for believing, that the difference in the planes
of life and experience of the Departed constitutes no
obstacle to re-union. Nay, this very variety in life
and experience may be one of the greatest causes
which promote re-union ; for in obedience to that
Divine principle to which we have referred, God, we
believe, uses the ministry of souk in the higher spheres
of Spiritual-Ufe, to inspire, to raise, to bless, to bring
closer to Himself, the souls in lower spheres. The
Divine modus operandi holds good in both Worlds ;
because God is unchangeable, and His Christ, " the
same all through the ages."

!i1

I, ii ■

124

i; --J

:| si

• ■ '4

IX. Apart from direct communications from them
how may we best realize that the Departed are still
living, and in relationship with us ?

By the term " direct communications," the Ques-
tioner is of course, referring to the manifestation to
persons in earth-hfe of those who have " passed
over," in such a way as to cause themselves to be
seen, or heard, or their presence felt. It has been
shown in another part of this volume that this power
of manifestation is not granted to all in spirit-life ;
and that, in many cases in which it is granted, the
manifestation may not be made, because the neces-
sary conditions may be lacking. The one on the
earth-plane may be so psychically undeveloped as
to render the Departed one wholly incapable of
making his presence realizable. The spirit-friend
may be near us-so near, that were the faculties of
our interior spirit-body opened (as were the spiritual

PROBLEMS OF THE SPIRITUAL.

125

-if

eyes of the young man in the Bible story, and the
spiritual eyes and ears of the three Apostles on the
Mount of Transfiguration), we should see him, and
hear him speak to us.

But in the case of many who long for such a mani-
festation of departed ones, the interior powers are
as yet unopened, "^hose dear ones may come to us,
and we may not -^ -J ability to register their

presence. By such psychically undeveloped ones,
it is asked — How may we best realize that the
Departed are still living, and in relationship with us ?
The answer is a simple one.

The first and greatest of all means for the attain-
ment of this is hy praying for them.

Those teachers of the Christian Religion who dis-
countenance Prayer for the Departed rob the
bereaved of one of the greatest consolations that the
Gospel can give. They deny to them just the one
thing of all others which is most needed in that ex-
perience of separation and loss which comes with
death. A beloved one is taken from us ; the bond
which linked us to that one appears to have been
ruthlessly broken ; the being himself has passed
beyond the reach of our sight and touch ; and the
teachers of that School of religious thought to which

Il^

Z26

I 111 ■

PROBLEMS OF THE SPIRITUAL.

I have alluded, tell us that to pray for him is foolish
useless, Popish and wrong. Some of them will tell
us (as they have told me) that the mere suggestion of
praying for the Departed arises from the DevU.
And so the poor mourner is left to get over his
bereavement and distress in the best way he can
The most that the theology of that School can
offer, is a hope that at some distant day we may see
again the ones whom we have lost. Will this kind
of teaching comfort and satisfy a poor saddened
heart, or brighten a darkened hfe ? We assert em-
phatically that it will not. If Death removes from
you one who -s very near and dear to you, you can.
not be comforted until you hold the conviction that
that one is still living and still in relationship with
you. The old theological notion as to death will
not give you this conviction. I have received hun-
dreds of letters from mourners in which it has been
confessed that the thought of a resurrection and
re.union r* , distant day has brought not the slightest
sense of relief to them. The mourner who is unable
to realize that his departed beloved one is still living
and still in relationship with him, is in much the
same case as Martha was when her brother died and
she discovered that the doctrine of the resurrection

PROBLEMS OF THE SPIRITUAL.

127

of a dead man at the end of Time, was but a poor
solace to her whose heart was crying out for a living
brother.

How suggestive that Gospel story is ! Lazarus
had died, and Jesus was on His way to the mourning
sisters. He is met by Martha, who sorrowfully
reproaches Him for His delay in coming—" Lord,
if Thou hadst been here, my brother had not died."
Note how the Saviour leads the mind of the woman
to a conception of dying, not contained in the
teaching of her day ; viz. that Death involves no
cessation of being. From the starting-point of the
religious thought accepted by her, F*^ will lift her
to the perception of a far grander more com-

forting truth.

" Jesus saith unto her — Thy brother shall be
raised." There is a ring almost of impatience and
disappointment in the rejoinder of Martha, as if she
said — " Oh ! I know that ; from my childhood I
have been taught to believe that : I know that he
shall rise in the Rising at the last day. But, Lord
Jesus, it does not meet my case in the slightest degree.
Is there nothing more you can tell me ? It is of the
present and not of the future I am thinking. It is
the thought of a dead brother and our relationship

128 PROBLEMS OF THE SPIRITUAL.

broken by Death which darkens my mind and breaks
my heart. 'The last day ' is so far off, and so
detached from my present life and experience. In
the meanwhile— what ? Oh ! I want, I want a living
brother."

How splendidly was the answer to that cry of the
woman's heart voiced by Jesus, in that declaration
that physical death touches not the man, but only
" the tabernacle " of him. " I, Myself, am the Rising
and the Life ; he that is trusting in Me, though he be
(as you call it) ' dead,' yet he shall live ; and everyone
who is living rnd trusting in Me, shall by no means
die aU through the aeon. Trustest thou this—
this glorious truth I declare ? " (John xi. 25
and 26.)

Poor Martha ! She did not answer that question
of Jesus ; but we can believe that henceforth she
would no longer regard Death as the Extinguisher
of man's being, and the Destroyer of the relationships
of Love. The truth unrealized by the Rabbis was
disclosed by the Christ.

I have said that Prayer for the Departed, more
than anything else— more than all the reading of
devout books on Heaven and the Future, and all our
fond recollections of those who are gone— will give

PROBLEMS OF THE SPIRITUAL.

129

US the conviction that the latter are still living, and
that the relationship between them and us is still
maintained.

Try it. Pray for that dear one whom God has
called hence, and in whom your whole soul and life,
perhaps, was wrapped up. Pray for him or her ;
not once, nor twice, but every day and an)rwhere ;
and gradually there will come to your poor bereaved
soul the glorioas assurance that the one you love-
though the earthly body lie crumbling in the dust,
is a being of life and thought, and of continued love
for you. Gradually such prayers will make you
realize that the World of Spirit is close to you now ;
that already you partly live in it ; and that Death
which calls your dear ones more fully into It, does
but usher them into a higher domain of life and
thought, where naught begotten of Love shall suffer
loss.

There is another way, less potent than Prayer, by
which we may assist ourselves in realizing that our
departed ones still live and are still in relationship
with us. It is by making the effort to calm the mind
when under the experience of bereavement and
sorrow. Excessive grief, and still more despair,
raise a barrier which prevents many a dear one on

130

PROBLEMS OF THE SPIRITUAL.

the Other Side from coming near to us. Rebellious
and hopeless sorrow is a hindrance to them in fulfilling
a Divine mission of comforting the broken-hearted.
Uplifting and helpful thoughts and soul-impulses
projected by them to us are often not received,
because the receiving mind is so engrossed with its
own thoughts and emotions, as to make it insensible
to an impact from without. The " still, small
voice " by which God would speak to us through the
mediumship of spirit-minds, cannot be heard until
there comes the calm after the storm, the earth-
quake and the fire.

Be quiet, be trustful, be expectant. Make the
effort to get the mind, at times, into a condition of
passivity ; to take it off the thought of one's self ;
to thrust into the background of consciousness for
a while the fact of one's own suffering and loss.
Then, when the tumult of grief has thus been stilled,
when the mind has been turned from the thought of
the self to the thought of the living dear one Behind
the Veil — then let the words of prayer ascend. The
calm, the love, the heroism, the determination to
trust God on our part, will constitute the conditions
whereby the Departed, although visually and
audibly unmanifested to us, may come very near to

PROBLEMS OF THE SPIRITUAL.

131

u^, and touv.h us in the higher parts of our beint; —
our mind and spirit.

In this way, we may realize their presence and feel
their maintained connectedness with us. Although
we may not possess the psychic gifts that others have,
our experience may be akin to the experience of a
gentleman whose letter has reached me as I write
this. He states—" Seventeen years ago, I lost my
young wife after a week's illness. To my surjirise,
amid the depths of horror and loss, I found a strange
exhilaration, and a consciousness of her real presence,
which never left me. I speak of this as an actual
experience of real life. I am convinced that the
incident of what we call ' death ' to our physical
bodies is powerless to destroy either character or
companionship."

■:1

itH

132

X. Are not such expressions as — ''The sen Q<ive «/>
THE DEAD which were in it," " Them which sleep."
and " Those that are in the graves " — an indi- a-
tion that the New Tesiamcvt writers regarded Death
as a temporary cessation of conscious being ?

No ; the use of these and similar phrases to be
found in the Bible must no more be taken to denote
that the persons who used them accepted the idea
which they literally express, than does our common
use of phrases, which are scientifically inaccurate,
imply that we endorse the inaccuracies contained
therein. For instance, the ordinary way of
describing the fact that the sun comes into, and dis-
appears from, the view of us on this planet, is by
saying it rises and sets. Literally, the statement
is untrue. The sun does not rise, nor does it set.
It merely appears to persons stationed ou a revolving
globe to do so. The state lent originated with
those whose astronomical notions were wrong.

IROBLEMS or THE SPIRITUAL

133

Now, no one supposes that the scientists of to-day
who still use the phrases " sun-rise " and "sun-set,"
profess thereby their belief in the old error which
those phrases connote— viz., that this earth is the
centre around which the sun and the planets rotate.
The use of the phrases is perpetuated, because they
have become the popular and convenient method of
describing certain solar phenomena.

Take another instance. If we are standing on the
deck of a vessel travelling ocean-wards and watching
the shore, we speak of " the receding land." That
is the popular way of describing an appearance which
is presented to us. But the statement is inaccurate ;
and in making use of it, we do not imply that we
think the land is receding from us. We know per-
fectly well that it is we who are receding from the
land. We simply make use of a common idiom,
which serves to express an experience, though it mis-
represents the actual fact. No one finds fault with
us for doing this ; and no one imagines that we know
no better, because we refer to things in the same
terms as they are generally referred to.

Take another notable instance of what I mean.
Many who accept the Christian Faith, account it a
most laudable practice to pray for persons who have

134

PROBLEMS OF TFIE Si i ITUAL.

.1.' dead," the

v.iild does not

vnd yet ihe

1 til',' V 1'" t itds

gone out of this life. They do s ., because thoy are
convinced that the latter are no/ d.ifd. !mt consciously
living. That constitutes the raison J'Hre of their
prayers for them. When the wo* : i , . • ists in speak-
ing of these departed ones .^
Christian Church declares that l. •
realize a great truth which she .1...
takes hold of this very phrase v ;.
so wrongly apjilied to the depuit i a ' • joins our
•* Prayers for the dead." Is th..' to ' iken as
denoting that the Church regards Death a.s involving
a cessation of being ?

Moreover, we ourselves, who do not dream of
confounding the departed ones who have passed
into the fuller life of the Spirit-World, with the dis-
carded and lifeless tenements which have been con-
signed to the grave, constantly find ourstlves speak-
ing of those living ones as " the dead." " My father,
my mother, or my friend, has been dead a great many
years," say we. Is our adoption of the popular
idiom to be taken as implying that we do not believe
in maintained existence at death ?

Now, the same argument holds good in regard to
the fact that our Lord and the wTiters of the New
Testament umU the commonly accepted terms

TROBLEMS OF TflE SPIRITUAL.

135

" the dead," " those in the graves," ttc, when re-
ferring to the Departed. They did not thereby
endorse the iKjpular definition as l>eing a correct
one ; nor tlid they imply that they themselves believetl
the Departed to be temiwrarily non-existent. They
simply employed an established form of expression
as the l>est moans of indicating the class of whom
they w.re sp'-akinf,'. The worlil called the De^>arted
" the dead " ; antl they used, as we do, the language
of the world, an<l si)oke of those who had gone hence
in exactly the way in which all mankind spoke of
them.

We cannot see how Christ and the Apostles could
have done otherwise. It seems to us that in con-
veying higher truth to mankind, there was a necessity
that they should make use of the tcnns of ordinary
human language. How could they have made it
clear as to whom they were referring, when making
startling statements concerning tlie so-called
" deceased," if tluy had described that class in a
way in which it never was described ?

Before the fuller light had been vouchsafed by
Jesus, the world had looked on Physical death, and
it had seemed to them to be the destroyer of c«*n-
scious being. The defunct body appeared to denote

136 PROBLEMS OF THE SPIRITUAL.

the defunct man. Consequently, those who had
died were spoken of as " the dead." " the ones in
the grave," or~more euphemistically and poetically
-"the sleepers in the dust." And such terms
became the common way-the only way of speaking
of the Departed.

Presently, the Christ with His Gospel of Life and
Immortality came, and disclosed the glorious fact
that those whom men call " dead " are not dead at
all. He taught that physical dying involves no
destruction of the man, nor temporary cessation of
his being. Abraham, Isaac and Jacob— •• dead "
for ages, as the world accounted them— were all
living unto God, said He. He told a dying robber
that on the day the body of the latter and His own
Body died, thfy, the men. should be together in
Paradise. And Jesus forced home the truth by con-
fronting some of His followers with a living Moses
whose body had gone to the grave fifteen hundred
years before.

Moreover, Jesus disclosed another glorious truth,
viz., that His mission of salvation was to be directed
not only to men in this world, but also to those who
had passed hence, and were living men in the Spirit-
World.

PROBLEMS OF THE SPIRITUAL.

137

How could He make it clear to His hearers that He
was really referring to the latter ? H He spoke of
them as " the living," it would be more than likely
that His words would be taken to mean the persons
who had not died. As yet, the world had grasped
naught of the idea of any community of interest
between those in this world and those in the Other
World, in regard to the saving Purjx)se of God. If He
spoke of them as " the departed," still His words
would be open to misconstruction by many. And
so the Revealer of Truth did the wisest and best
thing He could do — He adapted Himself to popular
language, in order that from the starting-point of
unenlightened thought, He might raise men's minds
to truer ideas. Take those words of the Saviour —
" The hour is coming, in the which ' all that are in
the graves ' shall hear His voice " (John v. 28 v.), and
" The hour is coming, and now is, when ' the dead '
shall hear the voice of the Son of God " (John v.
25 v.). He was alluding to that magnificent fact to
which St. Peter afterwards alluded ; which is, that
Christ is no less a Saviour to those in the Other
World than He is to us in this world. St. Peter
having declared that Jesus, after crucifixion preached
to ones departed this life (" the spirits in keeping"

138

PROBLEMS OF THE SPIRITUAL.

Kili

—I Peter iii. 19 v.), actually makes use of, as his

Master did, the common term applied to them

" the dead." He writes, " For this cause was the
Gospel preached also to them that are ' dead,' that
they might be judged according to (i.e. by the same
standard as) men in the flesh, but live according to
God in the spirit " (1 Pet. iv. 6 v.).

We have a notable instance of the necessity to
Christ and the sacred teachers of adapting themselves
to the common idioms of their day. Lazarus, tlie
friend of Jesus, had physically died, and our Lord was
conscious of it. Christ knew that the death of the
bodily organization had not killed the man. The
real Lazarus— the spirit-man encased in a spirit-
body, while in a condition of temporary sleep, had
left his dead earthly tabernacle— Jesus knew that
he was still sleeping, and that although he had
passed out of the Physical body which was dead, he
had not awakened in the Spiritual. It was not the
intention of Jesus that he should awake in the
Spiritual. The spirit-man, without any experience
of the Spiritual World, because he would be sleeping
all the while he was absent from the body, would
only awake when the power of Christ should re.
incarnate him in a re-animated body which now was

PROBLEMS OF THE SPIRITUAL.

139

lying dead in a sepulchre. And so the Master said
to the disciples — " Our friend Lazarus sleepeth ;
but I go that I may awake him out of sleep." They
did not understand Him. They did not know that
Jesus was voicing the great psychic fact that every
person in quitting the physical body at death, does
so in a condition of sleep, and only awakes when the
detachment has been effected.

The disciples thought " He had spoken of taking
of rest in sleep." But here is the iX)int — Jesus had
to resort to the limitations of ordinary ideas and lan-
guage, before He could make His meaning clear.
" Then said Jesus unto them plainly — Lazarus is
dead." But he was not dead ; and the Master said
he was not dead. Those, then, who argue that the
use of the terms we have been considering, commit
our Lord and the Apostles to the endorsement of
the idea that Death involves the cessation of con-
scious being, are wholly mistaken. If their use of
these terms did conmiit them to such an endorse-
ment, then where would be the consistency of the
Divine Speaker and the sacred writers, in representing
the " dead " ones and those " in the graves " as
capable of powers which only the living possess ?
It is only the living man, in this world or the Other,

li^

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140 PROBLEMS OF THE SPIRiri'AL.

that can hear the living Voice of the Christ of Life.
But all the difficulty connected with the New
Testament writers' use of these old-world phrases,
would disappear, if the words were expressed as
quotations, and it were remembered that these
phrases were used, because the ordinary language of
mankind had to be spoken, if the teachers were to
be understood.

Thus, when Jesus said—" The hour now is, when
' the dead ' shall hear the voice of the Son of God "
—He did not mean that lifeless, disintegrated phy-
sical oHects lying in the grave, or in the sea, or any.
where else, would hear Him speak to them. Without
mind, without ears, without any semblance to bodily
or spiritual organization, and without life— how
could they do so !

No; He meant that the glorious call from His
Divine Lips to advancement and more abundant
life in God should be heard, not only by incarnate
men and women in the cities and villages and high-
ways and by-ways of Palestine, but by the living
discarnate ones Behind the Veil. "The hour is
coming, and now is, when ' the dead ' (i.e. the ones
whom you in your ignorance call ' dead ') shall hear
the voice of the Son of God."

141

PART II.

/. As reported in the " Church Times " of March
(^h, 1906, the Bishop of London, in answering, in
public, two letters which had been sent to him, made
tite following statement. " The writers have been
reading the work — ' Our Life after Death,' and ask
what they ought to believe. That book teaches Uni-
VERSALISM. // leaves out the strong things Jesus
Christ said. What is called ' the strong language of
the Athanasian Creed,' is our Lord's own teaching.
Are we. His Church, to water down what He said? "

These are statements, sufficiently grave and im-
portant, to warrant me in dealing with them in the
pages of this book.

" That book teaches Univcrsalism," sa}^ the critic.
Most undoubtedly it does so ; and if the criticism
had ended there, we should have had no reply to
make to it ; except that Univcrsalism is most clearly

142 PROBLEMS OF THE SPIRITUAL,

taught in the Bible. But the following part of the
criticism seems to imply that the Universalist belief
is -icompatible with the doctrine of the Church of
England.

We subjoin the following facts, which, in our view,
show that Universalism is not out of harmony with
the teaching of the Church of England ; however much
it may be in non-agreement with the teaching of
individual members of that Church.

(I.) It is not generally known that the Fathers of
the early Eastern Church avowed their belief in
Universalism, and emphatically taught that Christ
wiU ultimately fulfil His mission as " the Saviour
of all men." That Evil would remain for ever as the
rival Principle to God and Goodness, presented itself
to them as a thought inconsistent and intolerable.
They regarded it as imix)csible, that an Almighty
God, " Who is not willing that any should perish,
but that all should come to repentance " (2 Pet. iii!
9 v.), should, nevertheless, in the case of countless
millions of the human race, be never able to accom-
plish His will. The exaltation of Satan to such pre-
eminence and power, as to regard him as a being
capable of everlastingly frustrating the saving power
of God, and of perpetually usurping the rule over

PROBLEMS OF THE SPIRITUAT,

143

the greater part of the empire of human souls, was
to them an idea akin to the old-world notion of rival
Gods — a God of Goodness and a God of Evil.

A study of the Alexandrian and Carthaginian
Theologies shows that it was the contact of the
Christian Religion with the Latin race, which caused
the adoption of a restricted view of God's Purpose and
Christ's Saviourhood,

That race was proud, exclusive and cruel in its
instincts, and when, under Constantine, Christianity
became the State Religion of the Roman Empire,
the characteristics of the race made their impress
upon the teaching of the Church.

The Church of England, in matters of doctrine,
commends the principle of appealing to the first
three centuries of the Christian Era. She could
hardly do this, if the Universalist belief, so widely
held by the early Church Fathers, were incompatible
with her teaching !

(II.) In the year 1552, a Body of Articles, known
as the " Forty- two Articles," was agreed upon by
the Bishops and other learned men of the Church of
England. The 42nd Article was one which con-
demned those who asserted that all men would fiinally
be saved. This Article was deliberately expunged in

? I

144 PROBLEMS OF THE SPIRITUAL.

1562. Surely the Church would not have done this,
had she viewed the Universalist position as an in-
admissible one! "The 42nd Article was with-
drawn " (said a Bishop of Manchester), " because
the Church, knowing that men like Origen, Clement
and Gregory of Nyssa, were Universalists, refused
to dogmatize."

Again, at one of the revisions of our Prayer-Book,
a demand was made by the Puritan Reformers, to
expunge from the Litany the words—" That it may
please Thee to have mercy upon all men." The
objectors asserted that as the Purpose of God does
not embrace the salvation of all men, it was mani-
festly inconsistent to pray for mercy on all.

The Bishops' reply was that the clause was per-
fectly Scriptural, and that wc have no right to limit
the mercy of God. The retention of this all-embracive
petition in the Litany is therefore, surely, another
indication that a belief in Universalism is not incom-
patible with the teaching of the Church of England.

(in.) But we turn to other parts of the Prayer-
Book in support of our assertion. Do we not, in
the same Litany, twice address our Lord Jesus Christ
as the " Lamb of God that taketh away the sins of
the world"? Do we not, in Holy Communion,

PROBLEMS OF THE SPIRITUAL.

145

repeat ihree times in one prayer this same address to
Christ ? We ask, are these words not a solemn exag-
geration, if for ever, in hell, the sins of any men are
to remain noi taken away ?

In the proper Preface for Easter-Day, we say that
Christ "by His death hath destroyed death." But
to abolish death surely must mean to abolish all that
sin has brought on man. Death in its Scriptural
significance, stands for alienation from God. If
souls are to remain everlastingly alienated from Him,
is it true to say that Christ is the Destroyer of death ?

In the Prayer of Humble Access, we say of God —
" Whose property is always to have mercy." Can
that statement be harmonized with the idea of a
hereafter condition for many, in which there will be
no exercise of mercy ?

One of the Ember Collects has these words —
" To those who shall be ordained .... give Thy
grace— that they may set forward the salvation of
all men." Either the words contemplate the salva-
tion of all, or they formulate a prayer which it is
beUeved will not be granted.

In the General Thanksgiving, we bless God for our
creation. If creation, for a vast multitude of the
human race, will mean, as we have been told, ever-

146

PROBLEMS OF THE SPIRITUAL.

lasting ruin and suffering, is there any cause for
blessing God for the creation of these poor, wretched
beings ? And was not the argument advanced by
a certain one against Marriage, a perfectly sound and
logical one, from the standpoint of that theology
which we reject ? — " If I were to marry," said he,
" I might beget children, and some of them might
spend Eternity in full. There could be no happiness
for me in Heaven, if I had to reflect that / was the
instrumental cause of the existence of irremediably
damned souls."

In the Church Catechism, the work of God the
Son is defined in these words — " Who hath redeemed
me and all mankind." We ask, is this statement
true, if all mankind is not to be redeemed ? We must
be consistent ; if any, even one of the human race
be finally and irretrievably lost, then Christ has not
redeemed all mankind.

We might adduce many more statements of the
Prayer-Book to show that that Book sanctions the
teaching of the " Larger Hope " : but these will
suffice.

My critic states—" What is called ' the strong
language of the Athanasian Creed,' is our Lord's
own teaching."

'■S-
3

-a

PROBLEMS OF THE SPIRITUAL. I47

In the first place, the Atlianasian Creed stands on
a very different footing, as constituting an authorita-
tive stai ment of Christian behef, from that of the
other two Creeds—" the Aix)stles' " and " the
Nicene." These latter received the sanction of
General Councils of the Church ; the so-called
"Athanasian Creed" never received such sanction.
It forced its way, with Its " damnatoiy clauses,"
into the formularies of the Christian Church, in spite
of no authority from a General Church Council, and
in defiance of the stipulation laid down by the
Council which authorized the use of the Nicene Creed
—that nothing was to be added to this last-named
Confession of Faith.

The contrast presented between the Apostles'
and Nicene Creeds and the "Athanasian" Creed
is very suggestive. The Apostles' Creed ends with
the words—" The Life everlasting," and the Nicene
Creed, with the words—" The life of the world to
come." The "Athanasian" Creed concludes with
the awful words—" everlasting fire." That fact, in
itself, gives a very good indication of its Western,
rather than Eastern, origin. Without entering into
the history of the " Athanasian " Creed, it will be
sufficient to say that it is admitted by all scholars

10*

148

PROBLEMS OF THE SPIRITUAL.

that it was not written by tJjc man whose name
it bears. It treats of heresies which had not arisen
until long after his death. The origin of it is very
obscure. The internal evidence points to the con-
clusion that it was probably composed by a bishop,
in Gaul, about a.d. 420-430. It was first admitted
into the Gallican Psalter, and was afterwards re-
ceived into the Office of the English Church during
the ninth century.

We mention all this, merely to show that the
" Athanasian " Creed is not of the same authority
as are the other two Creeds. There are many of us
who experience a feeling akin to pain, at being asked
by our Church, on the great Festivals of Christmas
and Easter, to publicly profess our belief, that
millions of our fellow-creatures will " without doubt,
perish everlastingly," because, as yet, they are with-
out Christ, or cannot see " eye to eye " with us in our
conceptions of Him. An ever-increasing number is
praying God that this antiquated " symbol," which
" shuts the door of Hope " against nine-tenths of the
human race, may soon be removed from our beautiful
Service, and no longer jar on the spiritual nerves of
those who come to church to bless God for His
•' inestimable love in the redemption of the world."

Si ',"•

PROBLEMS OF THE SPIRITUAL.

149

If the sweeping and awful words of condemna ' ion
in this " Creed " were true, they should call forth
from the congregation a wail of pity and despair.
Can anything, we a.sk, be more unseemly and more
un-Chriitlike, than to feel jubilant and ascribe
" glory " to God, at the prospect of wretched beings
who will be doomed to the inconceivable Ivorrors of
"everlasting fire"? If wc f^a//y believe. I these
" damnatory clauses," instead of singmj; a Doxo-
logy, we should fall down on our kner . and with
agonized heart and streaming eyes, cry, — Spore
them, oh ! spare them, merciful God ! "

There is something rather saddening, rather
indicative of an insensibility to others' wors, in the
fact that hundreds of thousands of Christians, on
the birthday of the Saviour, gUbly endorse the hope-
less statements of this " Creed," and then go home
with an unimpaired appetite for their Christmas-
dinner !

My distinguished critic says that the teaching
of this " Creed " is " our Lord's own teaching."

Let us examine this statement.

The " Creed " starts with the words—" Whosoever
will be (i.e. is willing to be) saved, before all things
it is necessary that he hold the Catholic Faith."

150

PROBLEMS OF THE SPIRITUAL.

The Catholic Faith is defined—" That we worship
one God in Trinity, and Trinity in Unity ; neither
confounding the Persons, nor dividing the Sub-
stance."

I pass over the fact that not one-half of Christen-
dom understands the metaphysical meaning of this
word— " Substance." That clause of the "Creed"
is, therefore, unintelligible to them. Are they
outside the " Catholic Faith " in consequence ?

Again, there is a very considerable body of
Christians who view Christ as the only possible
manifestation of God the Father. They take the
words of Jesus literally—" He that hath seen Me ,
hath seen the Falher " (John xiv. 9 v.) They believe
that when our Lord walked this earth, the Falher
was incarnate in that human Body. We think they
" confound the Persons." They love Christ, serve
Him and worship Him, but, according to the
" Athanasian Creed," they do not hold the Catholic
Faith. Will they, "without doubt, perish ever-
lastingly " ?

We take another instance — a very common one.

A man of business, religiously disposed, comes to
church, and s.^ys his prayers, because he sincerely
desires to do the right, and to live in communion

n}>-

PROBLEMS OF THE SPIRITUAL.

15^

11
%

with God. We tell him, in this " Creed," that if he
wills to be saved, he must believe that " the Father
is God, the Son is God, and that the Holy Ghost is
God ; and that yet there are not three Gods, but one
God." That mystifies him. " Tiiree times one are
not one," he says. He does not understand it ; but
he goes on praying to the great All-Father, in the
Name of Jesus Christ. He sets the mental subtilty
aside ; and, according to the " Athanasian Creed,"
he docs not hold a foremost Article of the " Faith."
Will he, "without doubt, perish everlastingly"?
We do not think he will.

Further, this *' Creed " asserts—" The whole Three
Persons are co-eternal together and co-equal." Here
is a man who detects, or thinks he detects, a contra-
diction in these words and the words of Scripture.

He remembers the words of Jesus — " My Father
IS greater than all " (John x. 29) ; and the words of
St. Paul— "Then shall the Son also Himself be
subject unto Him that put a!l things under Him,
that God (the Father) may be al! in all " (i Cor.
XV. 28 v.). He, honestly, cannot reconcile Christ's
and St. Paul's words with the idea of co-equality.
He is not " in tune " with the " Creed's " present-
ment of "Catholic Faith." Will he, "without

152 PROBLEMS OF THE SPIRITUAL.

doubt, perish everlasUngly " ? We do not think he
will.

But we ask— did our Lord Jesus Christ ever
teach, that in order to be saved, " before all things
it is necessary to hold the Catholic Faith," as defined
by the •• Athanasian Creed " ? Did He ever teach
that a man's acceptance by God depends upon his
assent to a number of metaphysical ideas concerning
Himself ? Many came to Christ for blessing, and
received it, who had very imperfect ideas of Him as
the Son of God ; many whose conceptions of Him had
risen no higher than the thought that He was a
Prophet invested with extraordinary powers. One
has only to read the Gospel narratives to perceive
that the only pre-requisite He laid down for the
obtaining of blessing from Him, was that men should
have trust in Him. They obtained His blessing,
because they relied upon His goodness and power'.
He focussed the mind of men upon Himself, as He
stood manifested to them ; not upon any particular
abstract ide^ which subsequent ages might form of
Him. The " Athanasian Creed " makes the salva-
tion of men to depend, not upon the glorious fact that
Christ will " save to the uttermost them that come unto
God by Him " (Heb. vii. 25 v.), but upon the accept-

PROBLEMS OF THE SPIRITUAL.

153

ance of definitions, not formulated by Jesus, but by
a document drawn up by an unknown author in the
long-ago.

S©, in answer to our critic, we as positively deny,
as he has asserted, that the teaching of this " Creed "
— which rests the salvation of mankind upon the
acceptance of certain Christclogical ideas engendered
in the atmosphere of controversy — is the teaching
of our Lord Jesus Christ.

He never defined the Trinity. He presented Him-
self as the Embodiment and the Manifestation to men
of Divine Love and Compassion, and said — " I and
my Father are one " (John x. 30 v.) ; " The Father
is in Me, and I in Him " (John x. 38 v.) ; " He that
hath seen Me hath seen the Father " (John xiv.
9 v.) ; "Ye believe in God, believe also in Me "
(John xiv. I V.) ; and there He left it. Men looked
at Him and recognized Divine Love shining through
Him, and were drawn thereby to the Father-God.
It was left to later ages to bedim men's vision of the
beautiful Christ, by a cloud of metaphysical specula-
tions ; and this " Creed " substitutes, as a condition
of salvation, for a simple trust in a Divine Person,
the holding of a certain set of theological ideas
concerning His Personality. We contend that our

154

PROBLEMS OF THE SPIRITUAL.

Lord, while He did teach that upon ^»msc// depended
the salvation of mankind, never taught that anyone
would perish, unless he should keep "whole and
undefiled " the mystifying doctrinal pronouncements
of the " Athanasian Creed."

But it is in respect to *' the strong language of this
' Creed,' " i.e. the •' damnatory " clauses— that we
take a still greater exception to our critic's remark
as to their being " our Lord's own teaching."

The clauses which come under this heading are
these—" He shall perish everlastingly," and " Ihey
that have done evil (shall go) into everlasting fire.'

The concluding paragraph of this "Creed"
accounts these two clauses as a j)art of " the Faith "
necessary for salvation.—' This is the Catholic
Faith, which except a man believe faithfully, he
cannot be saved."

Let us see to what this paragraph just quoted
commits as.

We must " believe faithfully " that there will be
some who will " perish everlastingly " and " go into
everlasting fire." What do these pronouncements
teach ? There can be no doubt on that point.
They teach, plainly and unequivocally, the doctrine
which has lain for sixteen centuries as a dark shadow

ml :

PROBLEMS OF THE SPIRITUAL

155

and an incubus upon the Gospel of Christ. — 1 mean
the doctrine of an everlasting Hdl of suffering and
misery, and of awful and irretrievable ruin to
human souls. These phrases connote the idea that
there will exist for ever in the universe a discord, a
horror, a condition of things utterly abhorrent to a
Being of Holiness and Love ; which condition will
bear witness that Evil is so strong and permanent a
Principle, that even God Himself, though He hate
it, cannot abolish it.

These " damnatory clauses " teach the doctrine
of unending pain and woe for all who do not hold
this " Creed's " presentment of the" Catholic F'aith."

That was the idea of the unknown author of the
" Creed." He voiced the theological conceptions of
Western Christendom at the time he composed it.
1 hen, again, these clauses have always lieen regarded
as bearing the signification we have expressed.
Romanists and Protestants alike have used them
as main-props of the horrible dogma of everlasting
Hell-fire. Those in the Church who have been the
staunchest upholders of this dogma, have been the
ones v,'ho have most resented any interference with
the " Athanasian Creed."

We are aware that many recite, in Church, these

Ik V

156 PROBLEMS OF THE SPIRITUAL.

awful words of condemnation, with a sort of mental
reservation, which leads them to think that they
cannot mean anything quite so dreadful and in-
credible as they seem to express. They are quite
mistaken. The "damnatory clauses" do teach,
and they were meant to teach, the doctrine of
everlasting woe. Those who reject this doctrine are
not consistent in reciting words in which that doctrine
has been intentionally embodied.

But is it true that these awful clauses are " our
Lord's own teaching " ?

We submit that Christ never taught that souls
will "perish everlastingly," or that they will go
into an ' everlasting fire." We admit, of course, that
there are a few passages in the Authorized English
Version of the New Testament, which, as they stand,
give a sanction to the idea of unending perdition.
But the words have been mistranslated, and made to
express something they were never intended to
express. Our Lord did teach that those who rejected
Him and truth and remained impenitent should
" die in their sins " (John viii. 24 v.), and that for
some there should be terrible experiences, symbolized
by the terms—" the Gehenna of Fire," " the Darkness
without," and " the weeping and waUing and gnash-

I';,' ♦

PROBLEMS OF THE SPIRITUAL.

157

ing of teeth " ; but He never said that souls should
perish everlastingly. His parable of the Rich Man
and Lazarus shows that His view of future punish-
ment was, that it is disciplinary and remedial, and
not vitidiclive and final. Terrible as were the ex-
periences after death of the selfish rich man, Christ
represents him as developing, in Hades, the God-like
qualities of sympathy, unselfishness and concern for
others. Such a representation is compatible with
the idea of the " saving so as by fire," and that these
terrible experiences into which human souls may
plunge themselves, are the " sterner resources of
Divine Love " for the recovery and not for the final
damnation of any ; but it is wholly incompatible with
the idea of perishing everlastingly. We can conceive
of nothing more contradictory in regard to God's
Almightiness and desire that none should perish,
than that the judgments of God should improve a
man, and yet, nevertheless, that he should remain
everlastingly lost.

The texts, we suppose, upon which our critic
would pre-eminently base his assertion that the
" damnatory clauses " of the " Athanasian Creed "
are ' oar Lord's own teaching," are Matt, xviii.
8 V and xxv. 46 v.

^If

'■,.■■ i

158 PROBLEMS OF THE SPIRITUAL.

In their mistranslated form they stand—" To be
cast into everlasting fire "— " These shall go away into
everlasting punishment." The Greek of those pas-
sages is—" To be cast into the fire which is aionial, or
age-long." " These shall go away unto an age-long
pruning." There is an infinite difference between
•' age-long " and "everlasting," and "pruning"
and " punishment " ; and no intelligent person doubts
that Christ used the word "fire" in a figurative
sense.

But after all, the strongest argument we can
advance for denying that " our Lord's own teaching "
was identical with that of the " damnatory clauses "
is, that if He taught that there is an everlasting
Hell-fire in which human beings will perish ever-
lastingly, He contradicted Himself, and set forth two
teachings absolutely irreconcilable. He said—" I,
if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all unto Me "
(John xii. 32 v.). There is no escape from the
conclusion. If this statement of Christ is true, none
will " perish everlastingly " ; unless we commit our-
selves to the inconsistency of supposing that some
may be drawn to the Saviour, and yet remain per-
petually lost.

*' Kve we, His Church, to water down what

I?- 1'

1 •

PROBLEMS OF THE SPIRITUAL.

159

Jcsas said?" asks our critic. Most certainly
not ; but at the same time, we are not so to mis-
translate and misinterpret some of His utterances as
to make them directly negative other of His utter-
ances. This has been done, for the sake of bolstering
a dogma which outr.iges every true conception of
Love, Justice and Mercy.

A very few words will aaswer the critic's charge
that my book— " Our Life after Death "—" leaves
out the strong things Jesus Christ said." The state-
ment is incorrect, as may be seen by reference to the
book itself. The " strong things " spoken by Christ
are quoted again and again throughout the work,
and in particular, on page 239 and onwards, under
the heading — " Passages referring to Future Punish-
ments, as they appear in the Greek New Testament."
No, it is not we who hold the Fuller Hope of Christ's
Gospel, who "leave out" any of the "strong
things " He said. It is true we strip His utterances
of some of the Roman and Puritanical significances
subsequently imjxjrted into them, and translate His
words in accordance with the original Greek. We
minimize no statement made by Him, as to sin, its
judgment and its consequences ; and moreover,
we take into our survey of Divine truth (as those

i6o

PROBLEMS OF THE SPIRITUAL.

who differ from us do nol), those surpassingly
stronger utterances of the Saviour and His Apostles,
than any words of condemnation spoken by them —
e.g. " The Son of Man is come to save that which was
lost : " " I will draw all unto Me ' ; " The Times of
the Restitution of all things " ; " That God may be
all in aU."

We find it impossible to think that our Lord and
the men who received their teaching from Him, could
have made exaggerated statements in regard to the
final outcome of the saving Purpose of God. If the
condemnatory pronouncements of the " Athanasian
Creed " be true, the word "all" in the passages just
cited must be taken to mean no more than " some."
Whether that is in harmony with our ideas, of Christ
as the Divine Teacher, we leave our readers to
determine.

NoTB. — It is only right that I should mention that when
I wrote to the Bishop of London, and pointed out to him
that his statement that my book — " Our Life after Death " —
" leaves out the strong things that Jesus Christ said," was an
inaccurate one, his Lordship replied — " It is a pity you went
by the ' Church Times * report, which is so shortened as to
be misleading. Here is the ' Guardian * report, and when
you read it, you will see that I go a long way with you. The
only expression I regret is ' left out.' Those questions had
only reached me a few minutes before, and therefore had to
be tEnswered at once. But what I meant by ' left out ' was

PROBLEMS OF THE SPIRITUAL.

l6l

— ' failed, in my opinion, to give adequate weiKht to.' It
is here that you do not carry me with you. Nothing was
farther from my thoughts than to misrepresent you in any
possible way." The Bishop subsequently embodied this
qualification of his criticism, in a public statement made at
tventish Town.

In order to avoid any misrepresentation of the case, I
append the followinK e.\tracts from a work of his Lordship
lately publishetl— " A Mission of the Spirit." (Wells Gardner.
Darton & Co.). It is the account of an important Mission
in North London, during Lent. i(/of>.

Un paue 27 of this work, the liishop writes —

" The most serious (juestion, in conclusion, is contained in
two letters atiout the 'ife after death. The writers have
been reading a book which I know, but have not read myself
for ten or fifteen years—' Our Life after Death.' They say
that the book has made a great impression upon them, and
has been a comfort to them in many ways, and they ask what
they are to believe about the life after death. As to that
particular book, I cannot say that I followed it in all its
conclusions. What seemed to me to be left out — for it
preached a kind of Universalism — wore the strong things
that Jesus Christ Himself said. It was He wlio used the
strong language : it is not the Athanasian Creed : that hymn
repeats in nearly all its statements what is in the Bible.
It is Jesus Christ's words that are the difficulty ; and if He
speaks about ' the worm that dieth not, and the fire that is
not quenched,' and with tears in His voice entreats us to
beware, who are we to water down what He says ? And
therefore I would recommend you a book which I believe
to be thoroughly sound, and which 1 have read to-day,
called " The Life of the Waiting Soul." by Canon Sanderson,
i would recommend this to the two questioners, and you will
see there all the sound conclusions which there are in the
other book, but it seems to me to be a more balanced state-
ment of the truth."

The other statement of his Lordship, in which he qualifies
the foregoing, is to be found on page 132 of " A Mission of the

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162

PROBLEMS OF THE SPIRITUAL.

Spirit." He writes—" Here I will say that when I said that
Mr. Chambers, who wrote a book called ' Our Life after
Death,' leaves out the strong sayings of Jesus Christ Himself,
I did not mean to say that he did not consider them, because
he considered them very carefully, but I meant that in my
opinion he did not lay sufficient stress upon them, although
there is much in the book that I heartily agree with, and it
is well worth reading."

As it is possible that some of the Readers of the Bishop's
book may see the first of his statements, and fail to see the
second, it appears to me that a damaging public utterance,
acknowledged to be inaccurate, and which was subsequently
amended, should not have been re-published at all. Its
embodiment within the book of a distinguished and honoured
man is likely to perpetuate the misrepresentation of my
teaching.

Hi f

i63

//. / contend that the passage in Acts Hi. 21 v. —
" The Times of the Restitution {or Restoration) of
ALL things," will not bear the construction yon put
upon it. The " all " only means a limited '* all."
Thus, " Whom (Christ) the Heaven must, indeed,
receive until the Times of the Restoration of all things
of which things God spoke by the mouth of His holy
prophets from of old." The " all " is limited by
the words " of which." The passage then reads —
" The Times of the Restoration of all things of which
God spoke," i.e. not of a universal " all." Conse-
quently, this passage does not support your view that
Evil will not be everlasting.

I will pass over, in Ihis place, the consideration
of the impossibility of reconciling the thought of
the everlasting continuance of Evil with the thought
that God is loving, mer::iful, opposed to sin, and
almighty. The idea is as inconsistent as would be
the idea that the Ught of the svm is powerless to dispel

II*

164

PROBLEMS OF THE SPIRITUAL.

the shadows of night, or that the waters of the ocean
could not extinguish a blazing fire.

We are shut up to one of two conclusions ; either
that there will be a Restoration of all things to God
(which excludes the idea of perpetuated Evil) ; or
that Evil will be everlasting, in spite of God hating it,
and being almighty.

The Questioner's point is, that the passage quoted
above implies that not all, but only some, wiil be
finally restored. " The ' all ' is limited by the words
' of which,' " he states. But why may not the words
"of which" (<Sv) refer to "the Times"? The
passage would then read—" The Times of the Restora-
tion of all, of which (Times) God spake, etc." If the
statement was only intended to convey the mean-
ing that the Restoration will include some, why,
unnecessarily and misleadingly, use the word " all" ?

The Questioner's interpretation reduces the signifi-
cance of the verse to this— the Restoration of certain
particular things of which God spake.

The Greek of the passage {dxpi xpovwv inoKaratirdaicjc
iravTuv, itv i\a\natv 0 Otoe) has been rendered in the
Revised Version, as, " The Times of Restoration of
all things, whereof God spake." The question,
however, of what is the true meaning is set at rest

PROBLEMS OF THE SPIRITUAL.

165

by other Biblical statements, which define what shall
be the character of that " Restoration " of those
Times to which the Apostle referred.

Isaiah write-:--" By Myself have I sworn, the
word is gone forth from My mouth in righteousness,
and shall not return, that unto Me every knee
shall bow, every tongue shall swear " (Is. xiv. 23 v.).

Our Lord said—" Elijah indeed cometh, and shall
restore all thiiigs " (Matt. xvii. 11 v.),

St. Paul wrote— "The creation itself also shall
be delivered from the bondage of corruption into the
liberty of the glory of the children of God " (Rom.
viii. 21 v.). In the next verse, he defines what he
means by " creation " ; he uses the phrase " the
whole creation."

If the contention of the Questioner be right, these
statements of Isaiah, our Lord and St. Paul must
be labelled as extravagant and untrue. None can
remain finally unrestored, if every knee is to bow to
God, and every tongue is to swear to Him, and the
whole creation is to be delivered from the bondage of
Corruption.

166

///. You have no grounds for believing that all
will ultimately te brought to God, from the words—
"As in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all
be made alive" (i Cor. xv. 221;.). The "all" is a
limited " all." The limiting phrases are, " in
Adam " and " in Christ." These are not co-extensive
terms. The " all in Adam " means quite a different
multitude from the " all in Christ." We are in Adam
by natural birth; we become in Christ by new birth.
That makes the "all" of the second clause a very
different thing from a universal "all," as you
assert.

Quite so; your interpretation and limitation of
this passage most certainly do make a vast difference
between the two " alls " ; to ;he exaltation of the
power of Evil, and the depreciation of the power of
Christ. The old theological conception accords to
Adam the power of evilly affecting the whole human

r 1

PROBL£MS OF THE SPIRITUAL,

167

race, and to Christ the power of blessing and saving
some only of that same human race. AH die in
Adam ; but not all, only some, will be made alive
in Jesus. Is this compatible, we ask, with the state-
ment of Him Who said—" I will draw all unto Me "
(John xii. 32 v.) ? At the Consummation of the
Divine Purpose, will the destroying and alienating
force of Adam be found to be greater than the saving
and drawing power of the Son of God ? If so, has
not the Scripture assigned too much to Jesus, in
declaring Him to be " the Saviour of all mankind ;
more especially of those that believe " (i Tim. iv.
10 v.) ?

In that grandest of all St. Paul's Epistles — the
Epistle to the Ephesians — the Apostle writes —
" That in the dispensation of the fulness of the times,
He might gather together, under one Head, all
things in Christ, both those things which are in the
heavens and those things which are upon the earth ;
even in Him " (Eph. i. 10 v.). Here, we hav a
presentment in which the Christ is shown to be as
co-extensively connected with the human race as
was Adam. By reason of its relationship to Adam,
that race became ruined and d based ; by virtue of
its relationship to Christ, it is Itimatoly to become

H^k

l68 PROBLEMS OF THE SPIRITUAL,

restored and exalted. The terms "in Adam "
and " in Christ " are in contrast. All, through the
one, have been cursed; while all, through the
Other, will oe blessed. Adam stands as the Federal
Head of the whole of humanity in regard to death ;
while Christ stands as the Federal Head of that
same whole in regard to life. To assert that the
" all in Adam " must be read in the sense of the
universal, while the " aU in Christ " must be taken
only in the sense of the particular, is to make Christ
less a Saviour than Adam was a Ruiner. According
to this, Adam can exert an influence on the whole
of mankind ; Christ only on some. What is this,
but to make the First Adam more powerful than the
" Second Adam " !

Again, St. Paul, in i Cor. xv. 28 v.. states that,
at " the end " (i.e. the end of those sons through
which God will have been working out His great
Purpose of salvation in Christ), He shall be " all
things in all beings." If Christ will ultimately save
only some, and not aU, an insuperable barrier will
be presented to the fulfilment of that glorious
prophecy ; for it is inconceivable to imagine God
as being " all things " to irretrievably lost souls, and
consequently, the Apostle's forecast would be wrong.

PROBLEMS OF THE SPIRITUAL. 169

Every soul to whom God is " all things " u a
saved soul, and every soul drawn to Christ is a
blessed soul, and therefore we contend that His
saving work will ultimately embrace every human
creature, or His statement—" I will draw all unto
Me," is untrue, and the statement of St. Paul also,
to which we have just referred, is a glowing expecta-
tion never to be realized.

" We are in Adam by natural birth ; we become in
Christ by new birth," states the Questioner. We
admit that ; but what if the Purpose of God be that
all shall ultimately become in Christ by new birth ;
that, after the punishment for sin, the pruning and
the disciplining, all the lost sheep, the lost coins and
the lost sons should be restored by Christ to the great
All-Father !

That, surely, is a grander conception of the Gospel,
' ban the one which pictures the Christ as unable to
accomplish His mission as " the Saviour of all man-
kind " !

r^o

IV. In quoting St. Paul's words—" Who is th4
Saviour of all men " (i Tim. iv. lo v.), you omit
the additional clause—" specially of those that believe:'
In doing this yon give a wrong meaning to his words.
The word used by St. Paid is not " Saviour," but
" Preserver " ; for ..e adds " specially of believers."

My omission of the clause—" specially of those that
believe," is due to the fact that it was not required
for the purpose cf the argument with which I was
dealing. I was endeavouring to show that those
who deny that the whole human race will ultimately
be saved, altogether ignore a great number of the
statements of Scripture, which declare that this will
be so. I cited St. Paul's words—" Who is the
Saviour of all men " (among other equally as strong
passages) in support of my assertion. There was
no need for me to adduce the latter clause of the verse,
as no question was raised as to God being the
Saviour "specially of believers." That fact is
admitted by all Christians.

PROBLEMS OP THE SPIRITUAL.

171

The Questioner attempts to destroy the all-
embracive significance of this text, by substituting
the word ** Preserver " for " Saviour " ; so making
the passage mean that God is the Preserver of the
entire human race, and in an especial sense of the
beUeving section of it. He wishes to exclude the
idea that God will save all men ; but admits that He
is the Preserver of all.

But can He, we ask, with any consistency what-
ever, be called Humanity's Preserver, if multitudes
are to be left for ever in a condition of iTcparable
ruin and misery ? We think not. We think that
to describe God as the " Preserver " of all men, is
equally as strong a statement as to describe Him
as the " Saviour " of all.

There can be " no variableness, neither shadow of
turning " in regard to God ; hence, if He be the
Preserver '^^ all men now, He will be the Preserver
of all me ^or ever. If the old theological idea be
right, that multitudes of human beings will " perish
everlastingly," how will it be possible for God to
be their Preserver? Thus, in denying the Final
Restoration of all, we must deny to God this title of
" Preserver ot aU laen."

The Questioner a serts that the word used by

173 PROBLEMS OF THE SPIRITUAL.

St. Paul, in this verse, is not " Saviour," but " Pre-
server." The Greek word used in the text is
tt^irSip (Sdtir). The primary meaning of that
word is " Saviour," and its secondary significance—
" Deliverer," " Preserver."

We contend, therefore, that if it be not right to
translate this word as " Saviour," in the passage with
which we are deahng, it cannot be right to so translate
it in other passages of the New Testament. The
Questioner, by his line of reasoning, therefore robs
Christ of that highest title by which we love to think
of Him ; and Luke ii. n v. must be read only as,
" For unto you is born this day .... a Preserver
(twriip) which is Christ the Lord," and i John iv.
14 v., as, " The Father sent the Son, the Preserver
(not Saviour) of the world."

And so on, in regard to a great number of passages
in which this word t,u,rnp is employed. In thus
attempting to evade the force of . . Paul's statement,
the position of Christ in regard to humanity is
depreciated.

With regard to tn*- ..'aiise— " Specially of those
that believe," in respect to its relationship to the
antecedent clause— " the Saviour of all men," no
diificulty presents itscif to our mind. We believe

PROBLEMS OF THE SPIRITUAL.

I7J

that the great Purpose of God, in Christ, is ultimately
to brinj all human beings into union with Himself,
that He may become " all in all." In this sense it
is true to assert of Him that He is ' the Saviour of all
men."

The assertion is twt true, if salvation will not
at length embrace the entire human race. God
is specially the Saviour of " those that beli»ve,"
for the reason t^.at His saving work has already
commenced in such, and their identification of them-
selves, in this life, with the Purpc^'^e of God will save
them from many a painful and distressing experience
in the Life Beyond, which will befall those who, like
the Prodigal, turn their backs ujxjn the Father, and
only after suffering and shame " come *o then;
selves " and find their way to the Father 3osom.
It is because, in this sense, God Is specially the
Saviour of those that believe, that ';t Paul wrote,
•' Behold, now is the accepted time ; behold, now is
the day of salvation " (2 Cor. vi. 2 v.).

174

I*?

V. Do not the words — " Out God is a consumtng
Fire" {Heb. xii. 29 v.)— conflict with the teaching
that ALL will finally be restored ?

No ; on the contrary, we regard this statement
as being one of the strongest supports upon which
we base our conviction that the Universalist position
is right, and that the Bible's prediction of "the
Restoration of all things " (Acts iii. 21 v.) will be
fulfilled. The ultimate elimination of evil from the
universe seems to us to be guaranteed by the fact
that God is " a consuming Fire."

But what do we understand by this term ?

As applied to God, it can only, of course, have
a figurative significance. It cannot denote that
God is fire, any more than the words—" I am the
Vine," and " I am the Door "—denote that Jesus
is a tree or a piece of dead wood. The term signifies
that there exists in God a Principle which can be

I.. '■

PROBLEMS OF THE SPIRITUAL.

175

likened to consuming fire. That implies the destruc-
tion, the burning up of something.

Of what ? The " Fire " of a God of supreme
Goodness will, assuredly, not burn up anything but
that which is evil and worthless. " He will gather
His wheat into the garner ; but He will burn up
the chaff with unquenchable fire," said John the
Baptist.

The " chaff " ! But the Theology of the past has
got into a muddle, and created a host of Biblical
difficulties for itself, by giving a wrong signification
of the word "chaff." It has made the "chaff"
symbolize men themselves, instead of the evil in
men.

God as " a consuming Fire " has been interpreted
for centuries to meai:, that the Almighty will presently
consign countless myriads of human souls to endless
ruin and horror.

This particular text is seized upon in support of
his theory, ahke by the upholder of the doctrine
of Everlasting Punishment, and also by the believer
in the less revolting, but equally illogical, doctrine
of the Annihilation of the wicked.

The former's argument is that as " God is a con-
suming Fire," sinners will be consigned to the burn-

176

PROBLEMS OF THE SPIRITUAL.

■>l i

hi. I

ings of an everlasting Hell. The suffering, whether
mental, or physical, or both, according to some, will
be endless.

Those who hold this appalling idea deny that
the evil in the ones in Hell will be consumed.
Necessarily so ; they are cute enough to see that a
perpetual Hell would be no suitable condition for
any being ridded of evil. But they do not perceive
the inconsistency of describing as " consuming "
a Fire which leaves its victims unconsumed for ever
and ever.

The Annihilationist is very much more consistent.
He teaches that the " consuming Fire " will destroy
the Sinner; that the man will be wiped out of
existence.

But what does this latter theory involve ?
Plainly this, the defeat of God, and that evil is strong
enough to effectually frustrate for ever God's Love
and Purpose.

God's Love ! According to Christ, He " loved
the world," i.e. all His human creatures in it. God's
Purpose ! The salvation of all. His Christ was
declared to be " the Saviour of all men," and " the
Lamb of God which taketh away the Sin of the
world."

PROBLEMS OF THE SPIRITUAL.

177

Yet, according to the Annihilationist, God's
Purpose will never be fulfilled, and His Love for
untold numbers of the race He loves will come to
an abrupt ending. We are told He will stamp out
the evil in millions by sweeping them into non-
entity. Is He not "a consuming Fire ? " it is
asked.

Surely a strange way of bringing about " the
Restoration of all things," and of justifying Christ in
saying He would " draw all men to Himself " !

Will God deal with His evil-stricken beings as we
deal with our plague-infected cattle— kill them to
get rid of the disease ? Is this compatible with the
thought of Divine Love and Almightincss ?

And yet this, and far worse than this, has been
taught, and is even now being taught, by some who
have read this text in Ihe luriil light of a narrow
theology. Thank God ! the world is fast moving on
to worthier conceptions of God. Men are refusing to
allow any longer their minds and their moral instincts
to be enslaved by the traditions of the past.

The Gospel, as the Universalist understands it,
presents none of these difficulties to faith and none
of these shocks to reason and the moral perceptions.

Our God is " a consuming Fire," we say, because

178

PROBLEMS OF THE SPIRITUAL.

si,:

of His Love. That "Fire" will "bum up" the
evil— the " chaff " in human souls, just because He
loves those souls. All souls are God's, and no soul in
this world, or in any other world, to whatever extent
it may be a " lost " thing, can be beyond the radius
of the Love of the Father. The " lost piece of
money " comes from the royal Mint of Heaven, and
although it may have rolled away into the dust and
defilement of evil, and become a rusted and tarnished
thing, with the superscription of the Divine on it all
but obUterated, it still belongs to God. He has handed
over nothing which is His to a Devil. That evil-
defiled soul is still loved by Him. The mission and
work of His Son is "to seek and to save " the lost
things, and on the showing of the Christ Himself
that mission will never be accomplished until the
last of the " lost " shall have been found, and re-
stored to the Father.

It is the evil in men and women which makes them
" lost " rouls ; and God hates that evil ; not them.
Evil is selfishness, and selfishness is the antithesis
of Love. It interposes a barrier between God and
the objects of His Love. It thwarts for a while the
purposes of that Love. His " Fire " will consiune it.
By His judgments, by His disciplinings in this world

PROBLEMS OF THE SPIRITUAL.

179

and the next, by the very hells which men make for
themselves, God will " burn up " the evil in them.
Thus, the very judgments of God become the pledges
of His Love ; and thus, a passage of Scriptvure which
has been supposed to sound the knell of unending
doom and horror for the greater part of the human
race, becomes to us, in the light of Universalism, a
message from God which scares away the awful
shadows that men have flung on the Being of the
Father, and lifts us to infinite hope.

In the light of such thoughts, how luminous
become the words of the Psalmist — " I have hoped
in Thy judgments " (Ps. cxix. 43) !

: il

! 1

12^

A'! »

180

.»;

■ii >'■'

VI. In your hook—" Our Life after Death "-—you
contend that the word alm-in^ {aionios) will not
sustain the meaning of " everlasting." What other
Greek word could the New Testament writers have
used to express that meaning?

This question, which is submitted by a Clergyman,
is a very important one, for the reason that if this
word aluvioc does mean "everlasting," and there
are no other terms in the Greek language to convey
the idea, then that greatest and most awful of all
doctrinal errors — the dogma of unending woe —
finds a support, as far as the letter of Scripture is
concerned.

But, fortunately for the chance of doing away with
this great stumbling-block to the Christian Religion,
and of dispelling a grim and terrible shadow which
has bedimmed men's vision of God and His Purpose —
this is not so. The doctrine of unending woe is in

PROBLEMS OF THE SPIRITUAL.

l8l

opposition to the letter of the Bible, no less than to
the enlightened moral instincts of mankind to-day.
It is still held by some, but it is as an article of
credtUity, rather than as an article of faith. It is
an ugly thing — a skeleton in the theological cup-
board, which must not be brought into the light of
day. It is a doctrine which must not be thought
about, talked about, and argued about. It begins
to disintegrate and to disappear from the region of
the real and the true directly it is discussed. The
only chance of retaining it as a belief, and of still
remaining a God-honouring, loving and unselfish
Christian, is not to face it and not to attempt to
justify it. It cannot, without horror and doubt, be
faced by any whose mental powers have not in
regard to Divine love and justice been anaesthetized ;
and its justification is impossible.

Now, there will be no need for me, in this answer,
to substantiate the assertion that the word oiwviui
does not denote the idea of everlastingness.

The reader will find this point carefully and fu /
dealt with on ,/ages 221-232 of the book — " Our Life
after Death." The word is an adjective derived
from a noun (aiW— a»<7«). This latter word signifies
an age — an age which may be long or short ; but

^ i

182 PROBLEMS OF THE SPIRITUAL.

Which, however long, is terminable. It is never in

the Bible, or elsewhere, used to denote endlessness.

AWvof, its adjective, therefore means "age-

long," or " that pertaining to an age or epoch " ;

and nothing more. There cannot be predicated of

an adjective more than is predicated of the noun

from which it is derived.
The Questioner asks-" What other Greek word

could have been used (in place of this aiAu,o,) to

denote everlastingness ?

There is the word dti, an adverb = ever, always,
for ever. With the article, this word was used to
express unendingness ; e.g. i dd ^p-J-oc (the unending
time ; i.e. eternity). oJ dii Svric (those existing for
ever; i.e. the immortals). Moreover, this word a*/,
conjoined with other words, imports into the latter
the idea of non-ending. Thus, iu^Xacrhi =: ever-
budding ; du-^pvi,s = ever-sprouting ; iu-yiPtaiu =
perpetual generation ; and so on.

The Translators have rendered our Lord's words,

in Matt. XXV. 46 v. {awtXti^royrai oJro. t^ >c6\aaiy aW^.ov)

as, " These shall go away into everlasting punish-
ment." The true rendering is— "These shall go
away into an age-long pruning." A vast difference,
surely ! Why did our Lord, had He meant what the

PROBLEMS OF THE SPIRITUAL.

183

Translators stated, not say, " These shall go away
lis n»v dii liaitftv" (into the unending vengeance, or
punishment) ? There could have been, in that case,
no question as to the signification of His utterance.
And we have to remember that what has just been
stated in regard to this particular passage, applies
to all those passages in which the word nivvios has
been mistranslated, in order to make it bolster an
erroneous and pernicious theological idea.

But there is another Greek word ',hich the writers
of the New Testament could have used to convey
the sense of unendingness ; and as a matter of fact
it has been used by them for that purpose. I refer
to the word AtSwt. It is an adjective derived from
ad ; and consequently there can be no question as to
its signification being " everlasting." St. Paul, in
Romans i. 20 v., uses the word in reference to God —
ti atSioc avrou ownftis km Pf wr»/c, the translation of which
is given in the Revised Version as " His everlasting
power and divinity." This word ataoc was com-
monly employed by the Greek writers ; thus, ti^
itoiov =■ for ever, while ,) dtiwi owria (that which exists
everlastingly) was a phrase employed to denote
Eternity. Moreover, the noun formed from this word
— uiSiOTtit — is the Greek word for " Eternity."

M: ■' If

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IS-' *

184 ''ROBLEMS OF THE SPIRITUAL.

The New Testament writers, therefore, could
have used this word it^^, instead of ai^.^,, had it
been their intention to convey the idea of unending,
ness. St. Paul did intend to convey that idea when
he referred to God's " power and divinity " ; and
consequently employed the word. We can only sup.
pose that the writers who used the word „/.i..„,
(a word which is used hundreds of times in the
Bible in the sense of terminabUness) did not mean
unendingnes, thereby. If, as the Theology of the
past has asserted, they did mean /A«/, then why
we ask. select a word open to doubt, when other
words, whose signification is unquestioned, were
available for their purpose? Reverting to the
passage we have already quoted-" These shaU go
away into everlasting puni.shment," it would have
been perfectly easy to convey that awful significance
by the phrase «.V at^.ov e.'«^,.^. Thus we see that
other words were available to convey the idea of
everlastingness.

A difficulty which presents itself to those who have
not sufficiently studied this subject, has been dealt
with on pages 269-273 of "Our Life after Death."
Briefly ad. it is this : " If the word al^.o, does not
mean 'everlasting' or 'eternal' in regard to

PROBLEMS OF THE SPIR'TUAL.

185

punishment, then neither does it in regard to reward
and blessedness ; seeing that the same word is used
in reference to the righteous—' The righteous shall
go »ic ;»„;v aiMMoy (i..tO an age-long life).' ^Vhat
basis have we for a belief in everlasting life, if in
this and similar passages in the New Testament only
an aonial or age-long life is promised ? "

Our Saviour Christ in His reittnated promises as
to this aonial-life, and the writers of the Epistles
in their constant icference to the same thing, were
ftKi'ssing their mental gaze upon that great E^K>ch
which St. Paul, in Eph. iii. 21 v., desTibes as
" The Mon of the jeons " ; a particular iEoa, the
great ^on, the consummating Age of all the ages,
the Age whose closing shall see the fulfilment of
God's " Purpose of the aeons " (Eph. iii. 11 v.), viz.
the " Restitution of all things." It will be an .'Eon
of blessedness and of perfected being and life to
those in affinity and union with Christ. " I give
unto them this ^Eonial f«iwv4oi) life," said He.
But this .(Eon of blessedness and perfected life for the
righteous will include its epochs of pruning and dis-
ciplining and even spiritual death for the unrighteous.
Though it will be a terminable period, it will be a
vast one, as is indicated by St. Paul's words — " all

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PROBLEMS OF THE SPIRtTUAL.

the generations of the iEon of the aons " (Eph. iii.
21 V.) ; and Christ spoke of " aonial pruning "
and "aeonial death." This great Aon will close
only when the great Purpose of God in Christ shall
have been accomplished ; when the epochs of pruning
and death shall have passed away, and the last
" lost " and " dead " beings shall have been found
and made alive to God. To those who pass into
that great iEon, identified with Christ, it will mean
an aeon of enhanced and superabundant life ; a life
which will place the participators of it beyorJ the
reach of eeonial disciplining or aeonial death. That
is what our Lord meant, when He said—" If a man
keep My word, hs shaU not see death aU through the
Mon " («/f t6v ai'wya) John viii. 51 V.

It may be asked—If that great iEon wUl close,
will not the life and blessedness of that iEon also
come to an end? Nay, that cannot be. Like
a mighty river which has gathered the waters from
the smaller rivers and brooklets, and then dis-
charges itself into the great ocean, so the "iEon
of tne aeons " will merge into Eternity ; and the life
pertaining to that Mon, because it is God-Ufe and
Christ-life, will last for ever.
Not, then, upon the promise of Jesus to give us

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PROBLEMS OF THE SprRlTUAL

187

the blessing of the iEonial life (grand as that promise
is), do we base our hojie of immortahty ; but upon
the fact that linked with Him we are linked with
God. The God-life ill l>c in us, and that can know
no ending. " Because / live," said Jesus, " ye
shall live al.so " (John xiv. 19).

What has been said will be sufficient to show
how superficial is the argument, that, in rejecting
" everlasting " as the translation of the word «.Wioi,
we demolish not only the awful doctrine of everlasting
loss and misery, but also that of everlasting life
and blessedness.

We should consider ourselv.is as being in a pitiable
plight, had we to build our hope of immortality
only on a word (aWi/.oi) which has been applied
to the doors of a temple no longer >i existence
(Ps. xxiv. 7 V.) ; to a certain order of priesthood
(the Aaronic), which has long since passed away ;
and to conditions of social and national life that have
ceased to be.

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i88

VII. Is there a danger, in re'^ard to the Univcr-
aulist belief, of making the Benevolence of God dominate
His Holiness and Justice in such a way as to constitute
Him the Tolerator of evil ?

This is the form in which the question has been
submitted ; and although it is based on wholly
illogical assumptions, it represents one of the most
common, as well as easily-disposed of, objections
which are urged against the view contained in the
Bible— viz , that ultimately God will be " all in
all."

Two false propositions are implied in the question—

(a) That the Benevolence of God could only com-
pass the final salvation of all men, at the cost of
lowering the claims of Divine Holiness and Justice.

(6) That God in finally saving all would be tolera-
ting evil.

These are, assuredly, startlingly strange con-
clusions I Let us examine them.

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PROBLEMS OF THE SPIRITUAL.

189

First, with respect to the Benevolence— i.e.,
the Goodwill, the Love, of God. The question pre-
supposes that there may be a danger of unduly exalting
that. It is feared that God's Love may lie assigned
too predominant a position in regard to other attri-
butes which pertain to Him. That if the Love of
God be accounted too great. His Holiness and
Justice may be reckoned as too little. But can we,
we ask, over-estimate the Benevolence or Love of
God ? In the face of what Jesus and the writers
of the New Testament said, we should have thought
it impossible to do this. Christ represented God as
loving all—" the world " ; as being benevolent to
" the evil and the good," to " the just and the
unjust."

St. Paul wrote that he was persuaded " that neither
death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor
powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor
height, nor depth, nor any other created thing, shall
be able to separate us from the love of God." St.
John, whose Epistle is saturated through and
through with the thought of God's Love, reached the
highest point of Divine Truth, when in his definition
of God he wrote—" God is Love " (i John iv. 8 v.).

If this declaration of the Apostle is true, it follows

190

PROBLEMS OF THE SPIRITUAL.

that Love lies as the essential Principle of the Being
of God, and consequently must not only dominate all
those other attributes and qualities and powers which
go to make up the perfection of the Godhead, but
is the root from which they all spring. Thus Love
determines all that God is and all that God does.
Is He holy, and hates sin and loves goodness ? It
is because He is Love. Is He just, and will reward
the righteous and punish the wicked ? It is because
He is Love. Does He extend His pity and mercy
and pardon ? It is because He is Love. Is He
"a Consuming Fire" that by judgment and dis-
cipline will " bum up the chaff " in men ? It is
because He is Love.

Thus, so far from agreeing with the Questioner,
that the B( iovolence or Love of God must not be
made to dominate His Holiness and Justice, we
assert, on the authority of the Scriptures, that it
does dominate both; and that neither of those
qualities in God will be rightly understood by us,
untU we realize that they are the offspring of the
Parent-Principle of Divine Love. God Who is
holy, is not Holiness; it is but a characteristic of
Him ; and God Who is just, is not Justice ; that, too,
is but a characteristic of Him; but God Who is

it 1

PROBLEMS OF THE SPIRITUAL.

191

loving, is Love ; and therein is to be found the key
which will enable us to unlock the door of Truth in
regard to His purpose of salvation in Christ.

Now, it is owing to men having failed to perceive
that the Love of God must dominate, and determine
the exercise of all other qualities resident in Him,
that has given rise in the past to those doctrines
which have so misrepresented and disfigured the
Religion of Jesus. I refer to the doctrines of Pre-
destination and Everlasting Punbhn. mt. The former
represents the Love of God as exercising itself only
in the direction of a certain selected and privileged
few; making all others not only of no concern to
God in view of salvation, but even the objects of
His hatred. It was an idea which commended
itself to the nanow and exclusive mind of the ancient
Jew, and found expression in those werds cited by
St. Paul,— who shows in his Epistle to the Romans
a bias towards Rabbinical thought—" Was not Esau
Jacob's brother ? saith the Lord. Yet I loved
Jacob; but Esau I hated" (Mai. i. 2 and 3 v.).
This is not the representation of the Love of God,
as made by Jesus and by St. John, or even by St;
Paul himself, after he had advanced to the full
understanding of the Gospel of Christ.

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192

PROBLEMS OF THE SPIRITUAL.

The doctrine of Everlasting Punishment excludes,
of course, all thought of God loving the wretched
beings who will suffer that experience. The good
earthly father may love his son, though he punish
him for his wrong-doing. But that is because the
punishment is viewed as remedial. It is a means
adopted by the father for bringing his child into
accord with himself and his love. But no such
thought lies behind the idea of God's infliction
of everlasting punishment upon His creatures. It
is not an infliction of Love, but of awful and un-
mitigated wrath, we are told. It contemplates no
betterment and no recovery of the victims. It is
a final and irreversible act of Divine vengeance.
Thus, the School which has propagated this teaching,
has made what has been regarded as the Holiness
and Justice of God to so dominate His Love, as to
cause the latter to disappear altogether in regard to
an enormous section of the race.

In reference to both these horrible dogmas, we
ask — How can all the theological ingenuity in the
world make them to harmonize with the statement
of Christ that God loves all, and with that still more
penetrative statement of St. John, that " God is
Love"?

< ^

M- J

PROBLEMS OF THE SPIRITUAL.

193

When will the Christian world understand that
the Election we read of in the Bible is not the Pre-
destination of the Calvinist ; nor is the Hell of which
Jesus spoke the Hell of Mediaevalism and Protestant
Theology ?

Such doctrines as these outrage the idea of
Love, li countless millions of human souls are never
in this world or Beyond to feel the movings of Divine
grace, because the All-Father never intended that
they should do so; if it be true that men will
" without doubt, perish everlastingly, and go into
everlasting fire," then alas ! for the thought of God's
Love. These things, if facts, would mean the dis-
appearance of the Sun of the universe behind such
lurid cloud-banks of horror and despair, as it would
baffle the mind of man to conceive.

It may L? asked, how could such dogmas as these
have t/er been accepted by men who accounted as
true the words of St. John— that " God is Love " ?

It was in consequence of mentally placing God's
attributes of Holiness and Justice out of all true
proportion to His main great attribute — Love.
Those who have taught these doctrines, instead of
accounting God's Love as dominating His other
qualities, have accounted His Sovereignty, Holiness,

194

PROBLEMS OF THE SPIRITUAL.

Justice and Power as controlling, restricting and even
extinguishing His Love.

So in answer to the objection against the Uni-
versalist belief, as to the danger of making the
Benevolence or Love of God dominate His Holiness
and Justice, — ^we reply, that that which some are
pleased to call " a danger," - 3 account as the most
glorious fact pertaining to the Gospel of Christ ;
and that if what the believers in Everlasting Punish-
ment teach were true — ^viz., that God's Holiness
and Justice dominate His Love — it would be a catas-
trophe to the human race. There would be no sal-
vation;

But there is another point in connection with the
question which demands attention. It is that which
implies the possibility of under-estimating the claims
of Divine Holiness and Justice. The Universalist
is charged by those who believe in the doctrine of
Everlasting Punishment and Loss, with exalting the
Love of God at the expense of His Holiness and
Justice. It is alleged that not all men will be saved
— in spite of that promise of Jesus to " draw all "
to Himself — because it would be incompatible with
the fact that God is holy and just. Those who accept
this view adduce, as the main-prop of it, the argu-

A i

PROBLEMS OF THE SPIRITUAL.

195

ment that Divine Holiness and Justice demand
the irretrievable ruin and misery of human souls ;
and that were the Love of God to avert this, the
claims of Holiness and Justice would not be
satisfied.

It is a terrible thought to suppose that two great
qualities, which go to make up the perfection of God,
should ever have been regarded as the cause why
countless millions of the creatures He called into
being must suffer for ever and ever. But, thank
God ! the thought is as illogical, as it is dishonouring
to Him Who is Love. Thank God t it is but that
which a great pioneer of " Larger Hope " — the late
Dean Farrar — once described it as being—" an
ebullient florh from the glowing caldron of men's
heated and perverted imaginations." It has arisen
from an altogether untrue and exaggerated notion
of what constitutes Divine Holiness and Justice.

We submit that the idea of creatures remaining
for ever in a condition of ruin and alienation, is
completely subversive of any true conception of God's
Holiness and Justice.

The Holiness of God must presuppose God's
hatred of and hostility to sin, ^^ Thou art of purer
eyes than to behold evil, and canst not look on

13*

w i

ITT «r*

196

PROBLEMS OF THE SPIR..'OAL.

iniquity," wrote the old-world Seer, Habakkuk.
He did not, of course, mean that God was uncon-
scious of the existence of evil. He could only have
meant that it is impossible for God to look with
complacency and tolerj,tion on it. It is this antag-
onism of God's Holiness to evil which constitutes
the raison d'Slre of His Purpose of saving the human
race through Christ. " For this purpose the Son of
God was manifested, that He might destroy the
works of the devil " (i John iii. 8 v.).

But, we ask, does not the acceptance of this
doctrine that some — the great majority, according
to the old Theology — ^will sufler everlastingly, in-
volve the consequence that the Holiness of God
will never be satisfied? God's Holiness desires the
abolition of evil — does it not ? But everlasting
punishment involves the everlasting perpetuation
of evil. Those who went into an unending Hell
would remain unendingly evil ; since to conceive of
God perpetually punishing souls who had ceased to
be evil, would be blasphemy. What, then, is the
corollary ? That it beings are to be punished ever-
lastingly, evil will remain, and He Who is of purer
eyes than to complacently behold sin, must contem-
plate it for ever and ever.

PROBLEMS OF THE SPIRITUAL.

197

Which, we ask, is the more reasonable belief, and
more consonant with the thought of Divine Holiness
— that embodied in the Mediaeval notion, that sin has
the potency of everlastingness ; or that of the
Universalist, who believes that sin will be finally
annihilated, because God hates it, and God is
supreme ?

As I write these words, I am reminded of an in-
cident which took place at a gathering of clergy
whom I was addressing on this subject. One of
them — a representative of the old school of thought
— was so piously shocked at the idea of God's Pur-
pose embracing any but the few, that he said to me
— " I suppose. Sir, you would tell us next that the
Devil himself might be fmally saved." My reply was
— " That, I think, is not improbable, if the Bible is
true ; for if you believe that the Devil is an im-
mortal being, and that God will one day be (as St.
Paul asserts) * all things in all beings,' then it
seems very unreasonable to suppose that the Holi-
ness of God will tolerate immortal evil, even in the
Devil."

We turn now to the subject of Divine Justice.
The opposers of the Universalist bel' f allege that
the Justice of God calls for the endless suffering and

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198

PROBLEMS OF THE SPIRITUAL.

ruin of those who depart this life not in a state of
salvation.

The stock argument is, that sin, being an offence
against an Infinite God, is in itself an infinite offence,
and therefore demands an infinite punishment.
This line of reasoning is accepted by some as being
very profound and conclusive. It is really incon-
clusive, and very illogical.

We grant, of course, that sin is an offence — a very
great offence—against an Infinite God ; but that
does not constitute sin as being infinite. How, in
the nature of things, can it possibly be so ? The
person who sins is a finite being — how can he wield
a power which presupposes infinitude ? How can his
action be an infinite one ? Sin is not invested with
infinitude on account of its being an action directed
against an Infinite God. Unlike Goodness, sin is
not an infinite and indestructible Principle.

Goodness is of God ; while sin is not of Him.
We rightly predicate of God infinitude, and we may
[)redicate of Goodness the same thing, because it is
of Him. But we wrongly predicate of sin infinitude ;
for sin is not of God, and consequently lacks this
characteristic of the Divine.

The idea of evil as a Principle which is infinite,

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PROBLEMS OF THE SPIRITUAL.

199

i.e., boundless, endless, is not in accordance with
the teaching of Christ. It is an importation into
Christian Theology of the old Eastern Dualistic
notion of rival Gods, or rival Principles, contending
for the supremacy of the universe.

No ; sin is a dislocation, a disarrangement which
his taken place in the Eternal Order of the universe ;
a discord which has been struck in the orchestra
of Divine Harmony, by beings who have wrongly
used God's grandest gift of Will ; but sin is no blight-
ing curse which must remain for ever, no awfu.
shadow which can never be lifted, no everlasting
reproach to God for making man as man. Thus, it
seems to us that the very Justice of God to Himself
and to tlie universe over which He must reign
supreme, demands the final abolition of evil;

On the other hand, the thought of Everlasting
Punishment outrages every true conception of
Justice. The ones who talk so glibly and compla-
cently about an endless Hell, out little realize what
it means. It is a mercy that this is so ; for if all the
Christians who profess to believe thb doctrine really
believed it, suicide would be rife and our mad-houses
full. The doctrine is accepted without any appre-
ciation of its awful import. I give as an instance of

200

PROBLEMS OF THE SPIRITUAL.

this, a remark made by one of the Congregation to
whom I was preaching. I had been speaking of the
" Larger Hope." After the Service, this gentleman
was heard to say— " I don't agree with the preacher.
I was always brought up to believe in everlasting
Hell-fire : it was good enough for my forefathers^
and it ought to be good enough for me."

If the remark had been made to me, I should
have replied, that although this terrible conception
of an unenlightened age may have been good enough
for his forefathers, and may be good enough for him,
it is not good enough for God, in view of Divine Love,
Holiness and J astice.

It can produce no love of God in a human soul.
How can it ? Does the child love tho pi^tnt whose
principle is to punish, not in order to correct and
bless, but to ruin and curse ? There are those who
assent to this doctrine, and still love and trust God
in spite of it. But they can only do so by thrusting
this article of their Creed into the background of
their consciousness. They put the ugly thought
away in one of the dark cupboards of the mind ;
and there the fearsome mummy remains as the
bugbear of their faith, until God lets in the light
and air of Truth, and the ugly thing crumbles into

PROBLEMS OF THE SPIRITUAL.

201

dissolution, and is buried with the mental errors of
the past.

And further, this Mediaeval conception of Future
Punishment is not accepted by the intelligent thought
of the present age ; and unless the CLurch of Christ
can show that the Gospel of Jesus demands no such
belief, men will betake themselves for spiritual
guidance and comfort to other systems of Religion.
As a matter of fact, many are doing so ; and the
fault lies with those teachers who take the limits of
the ideas of men in the past as the standard of truth
for men of to-day.

In the light of advancing knowledge, and with the
growth of the Christ-like and humaner instincts, men
cannot, and will not, believe that for offences com-
mitted against a God of Infinite Love and Holiness,
during a brief earth-life, souls will be hurled into
unending woe and irretrievable ruin.

There is no Justice of God in such a thought;
Rather, is it an imputing to God of an implacability
and an insensibility to suffering, as would amount
to a slander, if alleged against the humblest Christian.
Let it not be thought that we min-mize the gravity
of sin, or that we deny the fearful and awful con-
sequences to those who wilfully persist in it. That

IS I

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202

PROBLEMS OF THE SPIRITUAL.

Ilii

Il-

ls one of the favourite misrepresentations of the
Universalist belief. We do nothing of the kind.
We simply declare that the Justice of God— to say
nothing of His Lore— points not to the everlasting
conservation of evil, but to its extinguishment, and
also to the final abolition of the Hell into which it
may plunge sinners— when the dark shadow of evil
shaU have been lifted from God's vast empire, and
"the former things— all that is not of God-
shall have passed away."

There is one other point connected with the ques-
tion which remains to be noticed. It is that which
sees a danger in the Universalist belief of accounting
God as the Tolcrator of evil. God, we are told, were
He not to punish men everlastingly for their sins,
but were, ultimately, by His judgments to deliver
them from the power and consequences of sin,
would thereby be tolerating evil. But why ?
Does anyone suppose that a judge is tolerating evil,
who sentences a sheep-stealer to imprisonment with
the possibility of amendment, instead of to capital
punishment ? That old savage law of the land,
which set a greater value on property than on life,
was seen to be inimical to Justice, and it was
abolished. But the State is not accounted the

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PROBLEMS OF THE SPIRITUAL.

203

Tolerator of the crime of sheep-stealing in con-
sequence, M'" ^y'M the consistent thinker imagine
that the ( od o< Love h less opposed to sin, because
He does not consign t.ie sinner to unavailing misery
for ever. Did not the Christ say — " The Son of Man
is not come to destroy men's lives, but to save " ?

And lastly, it is not the teaching of the Uni-
versalist, but that of those who differ from him,
which presents God as the Tolerator of evil. What
could constitute a greater toleration of Evil, than that
sinners are never to be saved^ and that sin is to
remain throughout the rolling seons of Eternity a
deathless Power, which even Omnipotence Himself
cannot extinguish I

What, we ask again, can be more in harmony with
the thought that God is non-tolerant in rcganl to evil,
than that belief, which by the eye of faith sees
the great accomplishment of the Mission of Christ —
the drawing of all to Himself !

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204

VIII. Is it right for me to pray for a dear departed
one, who did not accept the commonly taught views
concerning the Christian Faith? If so, what kind
of prayer could I use ?

This is a question put by a devout Christian lady,
whose grief at the loss of her husband was terribly
accentuated by her belief that the condition and
destiny of every soul is determined for eternity at
death. The great obstacle to her acceptance of the
Gospel of Hope and Comfort n2& that misinterpreted
text—" In the place where the tree falleth, there it
shall be " (Eccles. xi. 3 v.). She had been taught
to think that these words excluded all possibility
of enlightenment and salvation beyond the grave.

Let us, in passing, consider this passage. In the
first place, it is the utterance of a man who lived
" in the twilight of Divine revelation " ; who was not
morally exemplary ; and who, at times, was ultra-
pessimistic. It seems to us extraordinary that the

PROBLEMS OF THE SPIRITUAL.

205

statement of such a person should have constituted
the main-prop of a theory which shuts the door of
hope against at least nine-tenths of the human race.
Yet so it is. The glorious words of Christ concern-
ing " lost " ones, and the statements of those after
Him who reflected the truth as taught by Him, have
been stripped of their far-reaching significance,
because of that saying of this man of " the twilight."
Theology, in the past, has placed the utterances of
Solomon on the same level of inspiration as the utter-
ances of Jesus and His Apostles.

In the next place, we do not believe that Solomon,
in making this assertion, had the slightest idea that
he was «??ying anything which after-ages would con-
strue . Divine declaration that there can be no
salvatic . atter death. The context of the passage
makes it very questionable whether he was thinking
at all about future existence. But even if he had
been thinking of that ; even if he had imagined that
the Love and Purpose of God were so circumscribed
as not to ' able to operate in regard to humanity
beyond the earth-life — what of that ? Surely,
nothing that Solomon or any of the Old Testament
writers may have said is to be accepted as truth, if it
be in conflict with the teaching of Jesus.

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PROBLEMS OF THE SPIRITUAL.

The New Testament abounds in statements which
flatly contradict this utterance of Solomon. " There
can be no recovery, ro salvation after death," say
some ; " the words of Solomon exclude that hope."
We reply—" Very well 1 but to what does this commit
us ? " The vast majority who pass out of this life
are certainly not at the time saved souls. Was Christ
wrong in prophesying that He would draw all men
to Himself ? That prophecy will never be 'ulfilled,
if the myriads who are undrawn at death are not
drawn afterwards. Again, St. Paul predicted a time
when God shall be " all in all." Was he, too, wrong ?
God can never be more than " all " in some, unless
His work i saving is continued after death.

But the greatest disproof, perhaps, of the inter-
pretation put upon Solomon's statement is to be
found in that fact recorded in i Peter iii. 18-20 ;
and iv. 6. The Apostle distinctly declares that
salvation after death is possible. He asserts that a
crowd of old-world sinners who had physically
perished in the Flood, had been brought by God's
disciplining in the Spirit -life to a ':-ndition which
was no longer "disobedient"; and that to them,
when morally and spiritually attuned to receive
Divine enlightenment and grace, the discarnate

PROBLEMS OF THE SPIRITUAL

207

Jesus " went and preached His Gospel," that they
might " live according to God in the spirit." We ask,
Which statement are we to take — that of St. Peter,
or that of Solomon ? If Solomon's woids exclude all
hope of salvation after death, as the old Theology
has said, then St. Peter was mistaken. The dls-
carnate Christ did not preach the Good Tidings
{(hnyyiXiadn) to the ones who in carth-Iife had been
disobedient, because the restoration of them (accord-
ing to some) is impossible;

The old Theology has taken this passage of Scrip-
ture concerning " Christ's preaching to the spirits in
keeping," and has brought every conceivable learn 1
device to bear upon it, in order to obscure its plain
and natural meaning, and make it fit in with what
Solomon said. It does not see, however, that the
denial of the post mortem salvation of mankind,
involves the labelling of hundreds of the utterances
of the Christ and the New Testament writers as
exaggerated, incapable of fulfilment and, therefore,
untrue. What we have said may, perhaps, " clear
the ground " for the answer to the question with
which we are dealing.

Is it right to pray for the Departed who do not
leave this life in the Christian Faith ?

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PROBLEMS OF THE SPIRITUAL.

> •• . « j

The attitude of the Christian community with
regard to Prayer for the Departed is a curious and
an anomalous one. One great section of Christen-
dom— including the Roman Catholic Church and a
large and influential Party in the Anglican Church,
maintains that it is a Christian duty to pray for
those who have gone hence ; but considers that such
prayer should be restricted to the " Faithful De-
parted." On the other hand, a great section of
believers, comprising what is curiously termed the
" Evangelical " School (as if their particular tenets
constituted the only true presentment of Gospel
truth), views with disapproval, and even horror, all
prayers for believers or unbeUevers after death.
So Christendom is divided on this point. We agree
with neither Body. Both, in our opinion, are
attaching more weight to the utterance of Solomon,
than to the teachings of Christ and His Apostles.

This is what we mean. The Romanist and the
High-Anglican believe — and rightly so — that as no
one departs this life with his mental, moral and
spiritual being fully developed, a continued work
of Divine grace will be necessary after death, before
the goal of salvation — perfection— can be reached.
They consider — and rightly so— that physical death

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PROBLEMS OF THE SPIRITUAL.

209

will work no miracle of spiritual transformation,
nor will it constitute the imperfect saint on earth a
being without imperfection in Spirit-life. They admit
that the person most advanced in Christ-like character
at the time of dying, has stil! to scale many a height
of moral and spiritual excellence, before he can touch
the point of resemblance to the " perfect man — unto
the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ."
They believe, moreover, that the prayers of us on
earth will help on these souls Beyond, just as, in this
life, the prayers of Christians are uplifting influences
on others. And so, in accordance with the Christian
and sensible idea embodied in the article of the
Apostles' Creed — " the Communion of Saints," they
pray for the " Faithftd Departed."

We are in entire accord with them up to this point.
Let us keep an " All Souls' Day " by all means. Ii
will do us a world of good to set aside a day in the
year on which to fix our thoughts on the eternal
interests of others, rather than on our own personal
advantages in regard to salvation. Only, let us be
consistent. Do not let us call it the Day of "All
Souls " v'hen we mean only some souls ; only those
who are " in the state of salvation." And, moreover,
do not let us express omx faith in the possibilities of

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advancement Beyond, by adopting a black cere-
monialism which is suggestive of Pagan unbelief and
hopelessness.

The Romanist and the High-Anglican have nothing
to say in respect to praying for the non-Faithful
Departed. They look very " sideways " at the
mere suggestion of it. Without their perceiving it,
the old interpretation affixed to the words of Solomon
is influencing them. As far as the " Faithful " are
concerned, they believe that progress and develop-
ment after death are possible ; and, consequently,
reject the teaching that Death unalterably determines
the moral and spiritual condition of souls. As far
as the non-Faithful are concerned, they accept that
teaching, and offer no prayers for them, on the assump-
tion that it is impossible, or very doubtful, that t ley
can advance to light and salvation. It is here that
we part company with the Romanist and High-
Anglican on this question.

Turn now, for a moment, to the attitude of the
Low-Churchman and Nonconformist towards Prayers
for the Departed. They reject in toto the principle
of praying for " faithful " or non-faithful ones after
death. The meaning which they read into those
words of Solomon causes them to suppose that Death

J i

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2IZ

is the great Stereotyper of mankind for a future of
eternal bliss or eternal woe. " What," say they, " is
the good of praying for any, ' faithful ' or non-
faithful, when once they have passed that boundary-
line which renders any change of destiny im-
possible » Our prayers for the saved are unnecessary ;
while those for departed unsaved are wholly un-
availing. The latter in dying went outside the
sphere in which the Love and Merry of God can any
longer operate in regard to them." And then comes
the quotation of another text of Scripture, which,
when the sense of it has been narrowed ''o as to make
it agree with the words of Solomon, is supposed to
clinch the matter — " Now is the accepted time ;
now is the day of salvation." It is useless to point
out to such persons that " Now is the day of sal-
vation," is not the same as " Only now " ; and that,
although a person by his disregard of God and good-
ness in this life may make the work of his salvation a
very pamful and difficult one hereafter, the work
will never be accomplished. Our Lord's inimitable
parable of the Prodigal, and St. Peter's record of
what the Saviour did after death in regard to ante-
diluvian sinners, negative this notion.
The passage in question does not exclude the hope

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PROBLEMS OF THE SPIRITUAL.

of recovery Beyond the Veil. It simply declares that
the cultivation of the God-life within us is not to
be postponed ; that " now " ii the time, and that no
soul in this world is answering to the purpose of his
being, apart from God.

But to revert to the theological position of our Low-
Church and Nonconformist brethren, is it not a very
" big " assumption to assert that the Love and
Mercy of God is brought to an ending for countless
millions, at the grave ? We think so. How many
persons go out of this life possessing that knowledge
of God ail 1 Christ, which we believe to be essential
to salvatioi; and future blessedness ? Very few ;
certainly not more than one in every thousand of the
earth's population. Does God love them all ?
Oh ! yes. His Christ said He " loved the world,"
and that, of course, must mean all the persons in
the world. "Is it true that God loves them ? "
asks the logically-minded man who looks at facts.
" You Christians of a certain School of thought tell
me that there will be no saving work after death ;
and that this means non-salvation for the bulk of
mankind. You tell rae your God loves all. How
very strange that (according to you) He should love
eUl, and yet place the many under such circumstances

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213

in earth-life, as irom geographical, national and
social considerations He has precluded them from
obtaining a saving knowledge of Himself ! Is this
compatible with the thought of a Divine Love for
all the world ? "

There appears to us no escape from the answer —
" No ; it is incompatible — absolutely, hopelessly
incompatible with any idea of Divine Love ; if so be
there is no salvation of this greatest portion of the
human race after death."

But there is another very formidable argument
which we must bring to bear against those Christians
who deny tlie exercise of God's saving grace beyond
the grave. It is this. If it be denied that those
who departed this life unsaved may, in the great
Purpose of God, be finally brought to salvation, how
is it possible for there to be a fulfilment of those
hundreds of glorious prophecies found in Holy Writ,
that Goodness is ultimately to triumph over evil ;
that Christ is to overcome sin w»nd spiritual death,
and that God is to be " all in all " ? We contend
that these prophecies can never be fulfilled, apart
from the " Restitution of all things." If there be
no salvation after death, it means that only a tiny
proportion of the human race will possess " eternal

214

PROBLEMS OF THE SPIRITUAL.

life." In regard to inconceivable myriads, God, at
the time of their dying, was not " all " as far as they
were concerned ; and according to some, this con-
dition of things can never be reversed; The corollary
of this is plain to the lofical mind— viz., that Christ
and Holy Scripture promised far and away more
than would ever come to pass.

Whether our friends can upset this conclusion, we
leave it to be shown.

In the meanwhile, all that has been written above
will indicate how reasonable, how consistent with the
spirit of Divine Love and the principles of Christ,
are Prayers for the Departed. The " Protestant "
theology discountenances the practice. It has done
its best to divorce the idea from Christian thought
and worship. From the Prayer-Bo k of the English
Church it has cut out all those beautiful prayers for
the Departed, which stood in the Communion Office
and the Burial Service of the first Prayer-Book of
1549. It has altered (for the purpose of teaching
men noi to pray for the Departed) the words of the
Invitation, as they stood before what is commonly
called " the Church Militant Prayer." In the 1549
Prayer-Book, the Invitation was—" Let us pray for
the whole state of Christ's Church." The " whole

PROBLEMS OF THE SPIRITUAL. 215

state of Christ's Church " includes those believers
who are in this world and the far greater nuinlxT
who have passed hence. To pray for the " whole
state " would embrace the latter, and so the Reformers
altered the clause to what it is in our present Prayer-
Book — " the whole state of Christ's Church militant
lure in earth." The alteration is not a very inj^enious
one, because the "Church militant here in earth"
is not " the whole state of Christ's Church." It is
but a very very small part of it. The main-army
of Jesus is on the Other Side.

The theology of the Romanist and the High-
Anglican, on the other hantl, countenances Prayer
for the Departed, though only for the " Faithful "
among them. That, too, fails to grip the essential
princip- . of the Gosj)el of Jesus, which is the seekinj<
and saving ol that which is " lost." One wouUl have
imagined, in face of the Master's teaching in regard
to leaving the folded sheep and going after the
wandering one, that His Church, if she can only pray
for one section of departed ones, would have chosen
the non-faithful, rather than the " Faithful."

Pray for both, we say ; for the Christians who have
gone hence ; that a spiritual stimulus from us may
be given to that perfecting work in them, which.

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PROBLEMS OF THE SPIRITUAL.

begun in the earth-life, wiU be continued until the
day of Jesus Christ (PhU. i. 6 v.) ; yes, and for those
countless millions of non-Christians in the Spirit -
World, who may receive through us those telepathic
influences, those vibrations of the Christ-mind and
the Christ-spirit which may be contributory causes
to the development of the God-life in them.

Our Questioner asks— What kind of Prayer can I
use for one of these ? We would suggest a Prayer
such as the following :-—

"Eternal Father, I come to Thee pleading
for Thy blessing upon that dear one of mine
whom Thou hast called into other Life. I am
sorrowful, and the shadow of bereavement rests
darkly upon me; and I know that shadow
cannot be lifted except by the light of Thy
truth. O help me to realize those great facts
taught by Jesus, that all who have passed
hence still live unto Thee, and that Thy Divine
Love enwraps them all. Grant to my heart
the assurance that he whom I love is loved by
Thee ; that he whom I long to help and bless
will be blessed by Thee ; and that the life, so
linked with mine in past years, will not be a life
detached from me in the Hereafter. Father,

PROBLEMS OF THE SPIRITUAL.

217

my love for him cries out for some possibility
of expression. I want to bless him by my
love. Wilt Thou grant me this power ? Thou
hast revealed to us how mighty are the influences
of mind and spirit O let the vibrations of my
love (sanctified as they are by association with
Thee) reach my dear one in his spirit-Ufe. Let
them be the humble means whereby he may be
better attuned to receive the inflowings of Thine
own love, and better able to love Thee. I pray,
too, that it may be permitted to him to know
that I am praying for him. Let that knowledge
help him as his spirit advances ; and let it
tend to enkindle in him the desire to pray also.
May his prayers for me and mine for him main-
tain that bond of love which united us here on
earth.

" And O, dear Lord, I pray for his advance-
ment and happiness. Grant that all imperfect
ideas of Thee and of Thy truth may disappear
from his mind. Deliver him from all the
warping influences of prejudice and doubt
and make him receptive to Divine light as
Thou mayst vouchsafe it to him. May Thy
Holy Spirit so illuminate him as to enable

2l8 PROBLEMS OF THE SPIRITUAL.

him to 'know Thee, the only true God, and
Jesus Christ Whom Thou hast sent.' Grant,
too, that whatever in him is good and noble
may be expanded and perfected, and that what-
ever is weak and sinful in his character may be
eliminated. Give him, I beseech Thee, rest
and peace ; that passing from moral and spiritual
glory to still higher glory, he may at length
become 'the spirit of a just man made per-
fect,' and grasp the crown of everlasting
salvation.

" I offer this prayer, Eternal Father, in the
Name of Him Who told us Thou art Love.

' Amen."

219

i.-i.. -/ Christians depart this life to be with
Christ, how can our prayers benefit them ? Does He
not know exactly what to do for them without our
intercessions on their behalf ?

This question has been submitted to me again
and again by correspondents. It is based upon two
suppositions— first, that the departure of Christians
from this life involves their immediate presence
with Christ; and next, that their presence with
Christ renders all prayer for them unnecessary.-

But are these suppositions correct ? Let us
examine them.

Does the departure of Christians from this
life involve their immediate presence with Christ ?
The idea which is commonly held on this point
is, that all who die in the faith of our Lord
Jesus Christ, however small may be their spiritual
attainments, and however little their character

iti

220

PROBLEMS OF THE SPIRITUAL.

may have been developed, pass at the time of death
into the highest sphere of life, and enjoy the com-
panionship of the Saviour. The words of St. Paul,
spoken in regard to what he himself anticipated—
" Absent from the body, and present with the Lord,"
" Having a desire to depart and to be with Christ "—
are supposed to denote what will be the experiences
of all Christians on leaving this world.

The assumption is not logical. It is a universal
conclusion drawn from a particular premiss. Put
into syllogistic form, it would stand thus : St. Paul,
at dying, went to be with Christ; St. Paul was
a Christian ; therefore, all Christians, at dying,
will also go to be with Christ. The reader will
detect how inconsequent this reasoning is.

We admit that St. Paul did on leaving this world
go to be with Jesus, and that every other Christian
who departs this life with anything like the moral
and spiritual attunement of that Apostle, will also
go to be with Him ; but that is a very different thing
from supposing that all Christians pass at once from
the earth-plane to the Christ -sphere. In the case of
hundreds of thousands of Christians, their spiritual
condition would render it impossible. The law of
the Spiritual World is that a person must be morally

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PROBLEMS OF THE SPIRTTrAL.

221

and spiritually adjusted to the sphere in which he
lives, moves, and has his being.

In the case of St. Paul, we have one whose moral
and spiritual development while still in the flesh was
such as equipped him for the highest experiences of
spirit-life. He was a man in whom the Christ-
qualities of love and unselfishness energized so
magnificently, that years and years of his life were
chaiacterized by the endurance of all sorts of hard-
ship and self-denial for the sake of others. No
grander words, denoting the height of moral excellence
to which he had at' ^d, were ever written by him
than those in which i said—" I could wish that
myself were accursed from Christ, for my brethren,
my kinsmen according to the flesh " (Rom. ix.
3 v.). What a contrast is presented in the moral
development of St. Paul and that of a once cele-
brated preacher, whose published sermon records
the awful remark— that he believed one of the joys
of the redeemed in Heaven would be to everlastingly
contemplate the miseries of the damned ! Again,
St. Paul was a man who was absolutely in spiritual
touch with Christ. He could write—" I live ; yet
not I, but Christ liveth in me " (Gal. ii. 20 v.) ; " For
to me to live is Christ " (Phil. i. 21 v.); He was,

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PROBLEMS OF THE SPIRITUAL.

moreover, one who, before he left this world, was so
spiritually and psychically developed as to enable
him to come into close association with the higher
spheres of Spirit life. He was "caught up to the
third Heaven, and heard unspeakable wordSj which
it is not possible for a man to utter " (See 2 Cor. xii.
1-4 v.).

That such an one should, at death, go at once
to the Presence and companionship of the Saviour,
appears to us to be the most reasonable of thoughts.
The Apostle in whom was the Christ, when he was
yet in the earth-life, would, of necessity, be in the
Christ-sphere as soon as he had stepped into spirit -
hfe.

But in regaid to that great number of Christians
who exhibit all sorts of moral defects, in whom,
perchance, exists the spirit of selfishness and un-
lovingness ; who could not say— in spite of their
belief in the Saviour—" For to me to live is Christ,"
can we really think that Death will usher such into
the Christ-sphere— the Sphere of highest Spiritual
experience ?

Nay, we think not. Their faith in the Saviour
will put them on the King's highway to that blissful
experience ; but there must be the ascension from

PROBLEMS OF THE SPIRITUAL.

223

sphere to sphere of higher moral and spiritual attain-
ment before the goal will be reached. There may
be vouchsafed to them at times a Vision of the Christ
as they move onward and upward ; but only, we
believe, will they " be with Christ," in the sense
in which St. Paul used the words, when they, by
the grace of God, shall have become fitted for the
Christ-sphere.

The Christian Church, therefore, in bidding us pray
for the " Faithful Departed," is quite right. She
implies thereby that Christians, when they go hence,
do not at once attain such perfection as to place
them in no need of our prayers for them.

But the supposition that there is no necessity to
pray for those Departed ones who may enjoy the
Presence of Christ, on the grounds that He knows
exactly what to do for them, without our inter-
cessions on their behalf — is a very unfounded one.
If it had not been so often put forth as an argu-
ment against praying for departed Christians, we
should have thought it impossible for any believer
in Prayer of any kind to seriously advance it. The
supposition proves too much ; it amounts to an
argument against praying for Christians who are in
this life.

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i^ ,

Our Lord Jesus Christ, without our intercessions
on their behalf, knows exactly what t^ do for
Christians, whether they be here on earth, or have
passed into the Spiritual World. Are we, therefore,
not to pray for the Christians in this life ? Let us
be consistent.

If there be no need for us to pray for departed
Christians, because Christ knows what to do
for them without our telling Him, then, by the
same reasoning, there is no need for Chriolians
in this world to pray for one another. The supposi-
tion, as we have said, proves too much.

A conception of the true significance of Prayer —
that it is no expedient for informing God of our wants,
and no means of inducing Him to be gracious to us,
but that it is a Divinely appointed method whereby
the soul of the one who prays, or that of the one who
is prayed for, may be made receptive of blessing —
a conception of this — ^woiald sweep away the erroneous
notion which is present in the mind of this Questioner.

We pray for Christians here and for Christians
There, because Prayer is a Mind-impulse which,
when touched by the Holy Spirit of God, can affect
other minds, and move them towards growth and
attunement with the Higher.

PROBLEMS OF THE SPIRITUAL.

225

Jll

" Brethren, pray for me," wrote St. Paul in whom
was the Christ. " Pray for us," say those saintly
ones who have gone hence to be with Jesus, " we
are amid the Alps of the Celestial, but there are still
higher peaks on which the Master has bidden us meet
Him. Every prayer you breathe for us sends a
God-vibration to our advancing spirit ; and from
the heights above us, and from the earth-plane
below us, we catch the impulse that constitutes the
very inspiration of our being — ' Excelsior.' "

236

X. On what grounds can we b. se our belief that
Jesus is not only, pre-eminently, A Son of Cod, but
THE Son of God^ in the sense of being Divine ?

This question is submitted by one who experiences
a difficulty in maintaining his belief in our Lord's
Divinity, in the face of such facts as that Jesus
said—" My Father is greater than I," " I ascend
unto my God and your God"; that He Himself
prayed to God, just as He taught us to do, and "lat
in His agony on the cross, He cried— " My xJ,
my God, why hast Thou forsaken me ? " etc.

Is not this, it is asked, incompatible with the
thought of Christ as Divine ? In praying to God,
was Jesus praying to Himself as the Godhead ?

Now, the most satisfactory way of arriving at a
conclusion c ■ this all-important question con-
cerning the Being of Jesus, will be, we think, to
ascertain what it was that Christ actuaUy stated in

PROBLEMS OF THE SPIKITUAL.

21}

regard to Himself. Did Uc claim to Iw the Son
of God in the sonsc of being Divine ? Did He
xssert that He stood in such close and intimate
relationship with God, and possessed such super-
human prerogatives, as lifted Him above th?
position of all men, however exalted ? In a word,
did Jesus teach, plainly and unequivocally, that
although He walked this earth as " a Man of sorrows
and acquainted with grief," He was, nevertheless, a
Being Divine in a sense in which no other man can
be ? Do His words justify the statements concern-
ing Him, made in the Nicijne Creed — that He is
" God o/ God, Light o/ Light, and Very God o\
Very God " ? It will be acknowledged that if we can
know what Jesus said of Himself, Hh statements
must be of infinitely greater value in forming a true
opinion of Him, than any statements concerning
Him subsequently made by others.

The Church's witness to the Divinity of our Lord —
borne as it has been all through the centuries, and
reaching as far back as the times of the Apostolic
writers of the New Testament — is of immense value
as affording the evidence that the Apostles them-
selves— the ones who were in the best position of
knowing what Jesus said — believed Him to be the

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228 PROBLEMS OF THE SPIRITUAL.

Divine Son - » God. and founded Christian Churches

on t. 's j-V^-t

•' Ii [ttm c'v elleth all the fuhiess (the Pleroma)
of the '.oclh ■« bodily" (Col. ii. 9 v.), was St. Paul's
definitic-. L. . rninp the Being of Christ ; and it was
accepi'J l>v ri« ' . oarly Christian communities
from w> om i'- mrches of Christendom afterwards
develop 1. I inconceivable that this view of

Jesus, so unparalleled by anything that had ever
been attributed to a religious teacher, would have
characterized Christianity ai its start ins- point, had
it not expressed the teaching of Jesus Himself.

We can understand and account for the fact that,
as the centuries roUed on, doctrines which were not
truthful representations of what the Master taught,
were imported into the teaching of the Christian
Churches ; but we cannot imagine that Christianity
started its career on a huge misunderstanding concern-
ing Christ.

It must be remembered that the ascription of
Divinity to a man was abhorrent and blasphemous
to the mind of a Jew ; and it is recorded that Jesus
was once in danger of being stoned for assuming
for Himself a Name applied to God. Consequently,
it appears to us, that nothing will account for the

PROBLEMS OF THE SPIRITUAL.

229

fact that St. Paul, St. Peter, St. John, and other
early Christian teachers placed the Divinity of Jesus
in the forefront of their teaching, except that th«'
authorization for their so doing came from Christ
Himself.

Further, it is not conceivable, in view of the
unquestioned moral and intellectual excellence of
Christ, that He could either have supposed Himself
to be that which He was not, or could have suffered
others whom He taught to entertain an idea con-
cerning His Being which was flagrantly erroneous,
or could have spoken so ambiguously as to leave it
uncertain what He meant.

If Christ led men to account Him Divine, when He
knew He was not so, then He was not good ; if
He proclaimed His Divinity, not Ixcause it was a
fact, but because He was under an hallucination,
then He was no dependable Teacher of truth.

Moreover, Jesus did that which no other teacher
of Religion had ever done, and which no one since
has ever dared to do. He focussed Religion in
Himself. He made Himself the Gospel He preached,
" / am the Way, the Truth, the Life, the Door, the
Light, the Bread of Heaven," etc. This exaltation
of Himself ; this concentration of men's thoughts

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,"■1

on His own Person ; this assumption of a dignity
pertaining only to God, which so shocked and out-
raged the ideas of the Jewish High Priest, is wholly
inexplicable, except on the supposition that Jesus
was the Divine Son of God.

H He were not Divine, the Jews who crucified Him
were right in accounting Him the greatest of all
egotists, deceivers, and blasphemers.

The Christian Religion, founded by Christ and
propagated by Hip immediate followers, was started
on the belief of His Divinity. This conception con-
stituted the Foundation Principle of the Christian
Faith. Whence this idea so alien to the Jewish
mind ? Whence this persistent conviction on the
part of those who consorted with Jesus, and of those
who subsequently came into contact with the latter ?

Surely, there can be but one reasonable and logical
answer, viz., that Christ Himself must have taught,
and did teach, that He was the Son of God in the
sense of being Divine.

It is on this ground we base our belief in His
Divinity. The testimony of the Church on this
point throughout the ages is of weight only as we
can regard it as being in agreement with the
utterances of Jesus.

PROBLEMS OF THE SPIRITUAL.

231

But this view of the matter suggests two other
and very important questions— Have we a record
of what Jesus said on this vital point concerning
His Being ?, and, Have we sufficient grounds for
believing that the record is a reliable statement
of what He said ?

With regard to the first of these questions, we claim
to possess a record of a great number of the state-
ments made by our Lord Jesus Christ ; and among
them many— far more than is commonly realized—
which deal with the question of His own Being and

position.

I have carefully gathered and systematized these
particular statements of Him, in order that it may
be seen at a glance how great they are. They appear
in the foUowing pages. They have been coUectcd
from the four Gospels ; which books were written
by men whose opportunities of knowing what the
Master actually said must have been far greater
than those of others who lived at later periods.
The Christian Church has always regarded these
Gospels as being the most precious and most
authoritative part of the Holy Scriptures, because
she has viewed them as containing a truthful re-
presentation of what Jesus actually taught. For

§'

232

PROBLEMS OF THE SPIRITUAL.

this reason she has enjoined upon her members to
stand at the reading of " the Gospel " ; and in this
way, and in some cases by the association of solemn
ritual with the reading, she has marked her belief
that the Gospels possess a value and an authority far
and away beyond that of any other books of the
Bible. And if it can be reasonably believed that
these four books do faithfully embody what Christ
taught, then, surely, they must be the best court of
appeal to which we can betake ourself in the settle-
ment of the question of what Christ really is ; for
in the very nature of things, what Christ said of
Himself is of far greater importance and weight
than anything which individual men or bodies of men
may have said concerning Him.

The other question— Have we sufi&cient grounds
for believing that the Gospels are reliable records of
what Jesus said ? — ^is also of supreme importance.

We believe that in the Gospels as they stand in
the Greek — the language in which they were originally
presented — ^with the correction of certain mis-
translations which were introduced to support pre-
conceived ideas of the translators, we have a faithful
representation of what Jesus taught. The grounds
on which we base this belief are these :

!
i (

PROBLEMS OF THE SPIRITUAL.

233

(I.) The writers of the four Gospels were persons
who were in the position of being able to give a truthful
record of Christ's teaching.

They were men who were contemporary with
Jesus ; and three of them— including St. Peter,
whose amanuensis only St. Mark was— were His
Apostles, and for several years His constant com-
panions. The other— St. Luke— although not an
Apostle, was in close association with the Apostles,
and his prefatory remarks in the Gospel and in the
Acts, show how he, a highly educated and cultured
man, caroiully gathered from those "who from
the beginning were eye-witnesses, and ministers of
the word," " all that Jesus began both to do and
teach."

It would be difi&cult to conceive of any persons
having been more favourably circumstanced than
these four Evangelists, for giving to the world a
true account of what Jesus taught.

We are aware, of course, that attempts have been
made from time to time during recent years, to show
that the Gospels were not written by the ones whose
names they bear ; but the testimony of the Christian
Church in the past on this point has not been upset.
The Post-Apostolic Church accepted without question

234

PROBLEMS OF THE SPIRITUAL.

these Gospel records as the genuine work of the
four Evangelists ; and that Church embraced many
who had been in contact with the writers them
selves.

Had a fraud been practised, in attributing to
distinguished leaders of Christianity works which
they had not written, it is exceedingly improbable
that the fraud would not have been exposed.

Further, when the Canon of the New Testament
was defined, a.d. 400, by a Council of Christian
Bishops, presided over by Augustine, a large number
of narratives concerning the life and teaching of
Jesus, as well as many epistles written to Christian
Communities, were placed before the Council. From
these, the books to constitute the Canon were to be
selected. The principle adopted by the selectors
was that only such writings should be admitted into
the Canon, as could be shown to be the work of
Apostles, or of men who had been in close association
with the Apostlesi

Subjected to this rule, great numbers of the
writings were rejected, and even books which are
now accounted as parts of the New Testament— viz.,
the Epistles, 2 Peter, and James, and the Book of
the Revelation— were placed outside the Canon, on

PROBLEMS OF THE SPIRITUAL.

235

the ground that the Council was not satisfied on the
point of their authorship.

But the four Gospels were unhesitatingly included
in the Canon, as being the genuine works of those
with whose names they were identified.

Surely, this is an indication that these books are,
indeed, authentic records of Christ I The exclusion
of the three books mentioned above from the
Sacred Canon, shows that a careful sifting process
characterized the proceedings of this Council;
which renders the fact of the retention of the four
Gospels the more significant.

(II.) Our enhanced knowledge with regard to
Psychic and Spiritual realities and ascertained facts
as to the powers of Mind, render it absolutely credible
that the four Evangelists received such mental
illumination as to make them truthful recorders of our
Lord's teaching.

An objection against accepting the statements
contained in the Gospels, as embodying the actual
teaching of Jesus, has sometimes been urged in the
following way.

" If it be granted that the four Evangelists wrote
these books, how can we be sure that what they
allege to have been spoken by Jesus, was really said

236

PROBLEMS OF THE SPIRITUAL.

■*

Jf,^

by Him ? With the full intention of writing * the
truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth,'
may not these men have unconsciously misrepresented
His teaching ? We know from experience how easy
it is for those who report the utterances of another
to obscure the significance of what was said. May
this not have been the case with the Evangelists ?
Writing, as they did, after a lapse of several years,
may not their memory on some points have laikd
them ? May not their own imperfect notions of
truth have coloured their account of the Master's
presentment of it ? As members of a Christian
Community which held exalted ideas of Jesus, may
not their minds have received a bias which caused
them to import into the words of Him a meaning
which He did not intend ? "

This is a perfectly honest and reasonable objection ;
and unless it can be satisfactorily met, there must
always linger behind the fact that certain writers
represented our Lord as having said that He was
Divine, the thought that they may have misunder-
stood the true significance of His words.

Have we any grounds for supposing that these
recorders of the words of Jesus were in any way
safeguarded against a misrepresentation of His

PROBLEMS OF THE SPIRITUAL.

237

Utterances ? Can we, in the light of present-day
Scientific knowledge, based on facts which it is
possible for us ic verify, believe that these men
received such mental guidance, illumination and
control as equipped them for being the reliable
witnesses to the world of One Who knew the truth
as no other has ever known it ?

We answer— Yes, those Gospel-writers, we believe,
did receive the help of which we have spoken ; and
we ground this conviction on no vague theory of
inspiration, but on an idea which is able to appeal
to existing facts in support of its credibiUty.

Psychology is a subject which has been scientifically
investigated of late years. The result of that in-
vestigation has been to demonstrate that it is possible
for the mind of one person to project itself as thoughts,
sensations and impulses to the mind of another, in
such a way as to produce a mental conjunction
between projector and receiver. All considerations of
time and distance are obliterated in this possibility.
Persons physically separated from one another are
able to be in mental and psychical touch; The dis-
tinct thoughts of the one may be transmitted to the
other.

Even the feelings and sensations of the one may

u tl

238

PROBLEMS OF THE SPIRITUAL.

it'!;

be registered by the other. A person may be at the
Antipodes, and yet may convey to another, who
is in spiritual tune with him, a definite idea, an im-
pression, an actual physical sensation corresponding
with a sensation experienced by the projector.

There is no need to give illustrations in sub-
stantiation of this statement. Those who are
abreast of present-day Science know |x;rfectly well
the possibilities connected with Telepathy and
Telaesthesia*

Those who do not know these facts, and are
open-minded enough to wish to know about them,
can refer to Professor Myers' work — " Human
Personality, an.? its survival of bodily death."

Now, these facts as to the possibilities of Mind,
appear to us to present the very Ixjst of reasons for
lielieving that in the Gospel-narratives we have a
reliable statement of what our Lord actually
taught.

Take the circumstances of the case.

It has been scientifically attested that thoughts
and impressions from the mind of one can be co »
veyed to the mind of another. If this is possible u^
regard to men and men, surely it mvA be possible
in regard to Christ and men. No one will be pre-

PROBLEMS OF THE SPIRITUAL.

239

pared to say that Jesus' mental possibilities are
inferior to those of ordinary individuals.

Further, the advancement of a being to Spirit -
life enhances the mental powers, because of the re-
moval of restrictions connected with the Physical.

When the Evangelists wrote their accounts of
Jesus, He had freed Himself from the restrictions of
the Physical, and had passed into Spirit-life.

Consequently, He was then better able to mentally
influence them, than He had been before. His words
— " It is expedient for you that I go away " — are
more significant than many suppose.

Again, it is unthinkable that Christ, after passing
from earth-life, was not desirous that men should
know the truth about Himself ; and if He possessed
the power of directing and illuminating the minds
of those who were to be the recorders of His
sayings for the centuries, is it not the most reason-
able of all thoughts to suppose He exercised that
power ?

Lastly, He actually promised that He would
mentally assist the writers of the Gospels in their
work — at all events as far as the three Apostolic
narrators were concerned.

Shortly before the close of His earthly ministry.

240

PROBLEMS OF THE SPIRITUAL.

;

i 1 :

He said, " These things have I spoken unto you, being
yet present with you ; but the Comforter, the Holy
Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, He
shall teach you all things, and bring tUl things to
your remembrance whatsoever I have said unto you "
(John xiv. 25 and 26 v.).

This promise, and those words of Jesus spoken
from the plane of Spirit-life — " Lo, I am with you all
the days until the consummation of the age " —
conduct to a conclusion which appears to us an
incontrovertible one.

It is this — that when the Evangelists sat down
to write the story of what the Christ of God had
spoken as He moved across the stage of Time on
His mission to bless man for eternity. He from the
domain of enhanced being flashed upon the minds of
those earnest, Christ-loving men a mighty influence
from His own Mind ; an influence which for the time
being mentally abstracted them from the present,
and transported them to the past, so that in thought
they were listening again to the words of One Who
spake as never man had before spoken ; an influence
which quickened their memory, imravelled the en-
tanglements of their ideas, made clear to them the
significance of what He had said, and limned upon

probli:ms of thk spikitital. 241

the sensitive-plate of their spirit a faithful jHirtraiturc
of Himself.

In this way, do we roKird the four Gosjk-Is as
being invr.ted with an authority which surpjss'.-s
that of f.iy other sacred writings. They claim to
be, not the statement of what distinguished men
conceived the Christ to 1^. but a record of what He
Himself said He is.

In the following summary, which will show how
great and embracive were the statements made by
Christ concerning Himself, we do not give all the
references to the several points to be found in tlic
Gospels. Our aim is to cause the Reader to realize,
with ease, how much was said by Jesus.

Chrirt. •tat.m.nt. eoaMnUnf Him««lf-Hia
a*ini »nd HU pow«rs-M rMordad in th* OMpala.

1. That He is the Son of Man.

(Matt. xvi. ,3 ; Mark x. 45 ; Luke ix. 2. ; John i
57 ; etc.).

2. That He was greater than the Temple.
(Matt. xii. 6).

3. That in Him the Law. and the Prophets had their ful-

filmen t.
(Matt. V. 17 ; Lu. iv. 21 ; xxiv. 44).

4. That he possessed supreme authority as a Teacher, with

the right to re-interpret Divine Law.
(Matt. V. 21 and 22 ; Mark ii. 2S ■ Lu. vi. 47-49 ; etc.).

342

PROBLEMS OF THE SPIRITUAL.

r* y*

5. That He if the Chrint.

(Matt. xvi. 30 ; xxiii. 8 aod 10 ; Mark viii. 39 asd io ;
John iv. 35 and 36).

6. That He is a King.

(Matt. xix. 38 ; xxvii. 1 1 ; Mark xv. 2 ; Ln. xxiii. 3 i
John xviii 36 and 37 ; etc.).

7. That He had power to appoint a Kingdom.
(Ln. xxii. 39).

8. That He was sinless.
(John vii. 18 ; viii. 46).

9. That He possesiwd prophetic powers.
(a) Foretold His betrayal.

(Matt. XX. 18 : xxvt. 34 ; Mark ix. 31 ; x. 33
xiv. 31 ; Lu. ix. 44 ; xxii. 33 ; John vi. 70 ; xiii.
31 ; etc.).
(B) Foretold the denial of St. Peter.

(Matt. xxvi. 34 ; Mark xiv. 30 ; Lu. xxii. 34 ; John
xiii. 38).

(Matt. XX. 19 ; Luke xxii. 37 ; John viii. 38 ; etc.).

(d) Foretold His rising and perfecting through Physical

death.
(Matt. xvii. 9 and 33 ; Lu. xiii. 33 ; etc.).
(E) Foretold the martyrdom of St. James, St. John
and St. Peter.
(Matt. XX. 23 ; Mark x. 39 ; John xxi. 18).
(fJ Foretold that the circumstance of the woman's
anointing of Him would be universally and
perpetually remembered.
(Matt. xxvi. 13 ; Mark xiv. 9).
(G) Foretold the incident of the man and a pitcher
cf water.
(Mark. xiv. 13 ; Lu. xxii. 10).
(h) Foretold the particulars connected with the siege
and overthrow of Jerusalem.
(Matt. xxiv. 2 ; Mark xiii. 2 ; Lu. xix. 43 ; xxi. 6
xxi. 20 ; and 24}.

PROBLEMS OF THE SPIRITUAL.

243

10 That He possessed highly-devtloped Psvchic powers.
(A) Cognition ; surpassing the power of the physical
senses.
(Mark ix. 33-34 ; John iv, 17 and iS).
(1) Clairvoyant power.

(Lo. X. i« ; John i. 48).
(cj Sensitiveness and respoti- veress to Psychic ia-
iiuences.
(Lu. viii. 4^ and 46J.

II. That He possessed the power of speaking to the Departed
(John V. 25 and 28).

13. That He is the Son of (icl,

(Matt. xvi. 16-18 ; xix. 17 , xxii. 4;-45 ; xxvi. 6j aad
64; xxviii. 19; Mark x. it, ; * ,. 35-37; xm. 33;
Lu. XX. 41-44 ; xxii. 70 ; John ui. i6. 1 and i« ; v. 19]
20. 21-23, 25. 26; vi. 40; viii. 35 and 36; ix!
35 and 37 ; xi. 4 ; xiv. 13 ; xvii. i).

13. That He proceetled from God.

(John viii. 42 ; xvi, 27 and 28 ; xvu. 8).

14. That He had been in Heaven.
(Johniii. 13; vi. 33, 38, 51.62}.

IS- That He had seen God.
(John vi. 46).

16. That He is one with God.

(John X. 30, 38 ; xii. 45 ; xiii. 20, 31 and 32 ; xiv. i, 7,
9, 10, II, 20; xvii. II, 21, 22).

17. That He is the Sharer of God's glory, power and honour.
(Matt. xvi. 27 ; Mark viii. 38 ; Lu. ix. 26 ; xxii. 69 ;

John V. 23 ; viii. 58 ; xvi. 15 ; xvii. 5. 10).

1 8. That He is the Possessor of inherent Divine-life.
(John xi. 25 ; xiv. 6).

19. That things done by the Father are also done by Him.
(John v. 19). '

16*

244

PROBLEMS OF THE SPIRITLf.\L.

Mark

ao. That the mystery concernins (;<kI is known only to Him,

and that He is the Revealer of Gocl.

(Matt. xi. 2; : Lu. x. 23 : John iii. i( and i 2 ; v. 20 ;

viii. 38, 40 ; X. 15 : xii. 4'J a"'' 5<> > ^^'i- ^S)-

2U That He assume.1 the Divine Name, and called Himself

" I-ord." , ,

(Mark v. 19: Lu. vi. 5 • ^''^- 3' : John x'"- '3 :in<> <4I-

22. That Ho holds the Headship over everythin;.,'.

(Matt. \i. 27; xxviii. is; Lu. x. 22; Jolm xvi. ij ;
xvii. 2).

23. That He wields authority over Angels.

(Matt. xiii. 41 ; x^i. 27; x.kiv. 31 ; xxv. 31 :
xiii. 27).
34. That He could exercise [tower over evil spirit-Ueings
(catnovta) who obsessed men and women.
(Matt. xii. 27 and 28 : Mark i. 23 and 23 ; v. 3 ; ix. 25 ;
xvi. 17 ; Lu. V. 33 and 35 ; xL 20).

25. That He had control over Physical -Nature.

(Matt. xvii. 27 ; xxi. 19 : Mark iv. 39 ; v. 4» : xi. 14 ;
xvi. 18; Lu. V. 4; X. 19; xiii. 12; xvii. 14: xvui.
42 ; John iv. 50 : v. 8 : xi. 43 : xxi. 6 ; etc.).

26. That He is the Drawer of men.

(Matt, xxiii. 37 : Lu. xiii. 34 : John xii. 32).

27. That He is the Rewarder of men.

(Matt. xvL 27).

28. That the judgment of mankind has been assi^'ucd to Him.

(Matt. XXV. 32 ; John v. 22 and 27 ; ix. 30).

29. That men's hostile attitude to His teaching will lay them

under judgmeot.
(John. xii. 4**)-

30. That He holds power to exclude from the liingdoia of

Heaven.
(Matt. vii. 21 and 23).

PROBLEMS OF THE SPIRITUAL.

245

31. That men's attainment of honour hereafter is dependent

upon their confession of Him.
(Lu. xii. 8).

32. That hereafter He will advance men.
(John vi. 39, 40, 44 and 54.)

33. That He could bestow the Holy Spirit.
(John XV. 26 ; xvi. 7 ; xx. 22),

34. That the Holy Spirit should glorify Him.
(John xvi. 14).

35. That He can quicken the dead.
(John V. 21).

36. That He has power to forgive sins.

(Matt. ix. 2 and 6 ; Mark ii. 5 and 10 ; Lu. v. 20 and
24 ; Lu. vii. 47 and 48).

37. That He can answer I'rayer.
(John xiv. 13 and 14).

38. That Prayer in His Name is accepted by God.
(John xvi. 23 and 24).

39. That, although He would pass out of earth-life, He

would still be able to be constantly present with men
in that life.
(Matt, xviii. 20 ; xxviii. 20).

40. That He is the Imparter of Divine life.

(John iv. 14 ; vi. 35 ; x. 10 and 28 ; xiv. 19 ; etc.).

41. That He is the Giver of Rest and Peace.

(Matt. xi. 28 ; Lu. vii. 50 ; viii. 48 ; John xiv. 27 ;
xvi. 33 ; XX. 19, 21 and 26).

42. That He is the Spiritual Food of men.
(John vi. 33, 35, 51 57. 58).

43. That He is the Light of the world.
(John viii. 12 ; ix. 5 ; xii. 46).

44. That He is the Saviour of the whole human race.
(John xii. 47).

246

PROBLEMS OF THE SPIRITUAL.

45. That His mission o£ saving extends to all that i» lost.

(Matt, xviii. It and 12: Lu. ix. 56; xv. 4 aacl 6;
rv. 8, 9 and 32 ; xix. 10).

46. That man's union with God will be possible only through

Him.
(John. xiv. 6 J.

47. That Divine Truth is personiheil in Him.

(John xiv. 6 and 7).

48. That the Anastasis (advance) of man at Physical d ?ath,

and his attainment of " the Superabundant lite "
are identified with Him.
(John xi. 23-26).
40. That Immortality is an impartation from Him.
(John vi. 50 ; xiv. 19 ; xv. 4 and 5)^

Such, then, is the Christ, invested with all thi>
grandeur and dignity of Divine PersonaUty, as He
created, we beHeve, the concept of Himself in the
minds of the men and women who Ibtened to His
words in the long ago.

Such is He. also, a? He stands forth on the
pages of the sacred Gosi^els. Ujwn the minds of
those chosen Evangelists He brought the impact
of His own all-powerful Mind, that this concept
of Himself might lie fixed by them as an abiding
witness to the centuries. When, as the Son of Man^
He passed across the narrow stage of earthly existence

PROBLEMS OF THE SPIRITUAL.

247

as God's Missioner of Love, His glory was bedimraed;
To bless man, and to bring him into closest contact
with the Divine, He Himself had to become Man.
The glorious Spirit-Son of God had to circumscribe
Himself within the limitations of the Physical.
The Divine in Him had to suffer a temporary eclipse ,
as He came within the shadows of earth.

His Divine power might be used for the blessing
of others, but not for the blessing of Himself. It
was the price He ]>aicl for Love.

And so the Jesus, although He was Divine, was
hungry and thirsty, and grew weary, and wept,
and was tempted, and agonized, and prayed, and
cried despairingly, as only a man could do. And
thus the " emptied " Son of God lived out HL>
beautiful life of Love among us, unrecognized and
misunderstood by the many.

But that Jesus is living now in a World of fuller
life, where the restrictions of the Physical do not
exist, and nought bedims the glory of His Being.

Many are turning their spiritual eyes to Him ;
and one day He, as the Divine One, shall draw to
Himself — as He said He would — the love and devo-
tion of all men ; for the old and crude ideas of God
and His Purpose are passing away, the horizon of

248

PROBLEMS OF THE SPIRITUAL.

knowledge is becoming wider, the Morning Stars
of the Spiritual are gleaming more brightly in the
firmament of human experience. And when the
night-shadow shall have gone, and the mists of
narrowness and error shall have been scared away
by the Sunrise of Larger Hope, then shall the Christ
be revealed to all as " ihe Desire of the nations "—
the " Light of the World," the Light of God Him-
self.

THE END;

Printed at The Chapel River Press, Kingston, Surrey.

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